DIRECT Distances to Nearby Galaxies Using Detached Eclipsing Binaries and Cepheids. VIII. Additional Variables in the Field M33B Discovered with Image Subtraction

Abstract

DIRECT is a project to obtain directly the distances to two Local Group galaxies, M31 and M33, which occupy a crucial position near the bottom of the cosmological distance ladder. As the first step of the DIRECT project we have searched for detached eclipsing binaries (DEBs) and new Cepheids in the M31 and M33 galaxies with 1m-class telescopes. In this seventh paper we present a catalog of variable stars discovered in the data from the followup observations of DEB system D33J013346.2+304439.9 in field M33A ((�,�) = (23. ◦55,30. ◦72),J2000.0), collected with the Kitt Peak National Observatory 2.1m telescope. In our search covering an area of 108'2 we have found 434 variable stars: 63 eclipsing binaries, 305 Cepheids, and 66 other periodic, possible long period or non-periodic variables. Of these variables 280 are newly discovered, mainly short-period and/or faint Cepheids. Their light curves were extracted using the ISIS image subtraction package. For 85% of the variables we present light curves in standard V and B magnitudes, with the remaining 15% expressed in units of differential flux. We have discovered a population of first overtone Cepheid candidates and for eight of them we present strong arguments in favor of this interpretation. We also report on the detection of a non-linearity in the KPNO T2KA and T1KA cameras. The catalog of variables, as well as their photometry (about 7.8 × 104 BV measurements) and finding charts, is available electronically via anonymous ftp and the World Wide Web. The complete set of the CCD frames is available upon request.