Dear Colleagues,
It has become increasingly clear to us that the heavily used Renson Catalogue contains many erroneous entries that serve to pollute attempts at collecting homogeneous samples of CP stars. There are instances where stars are misclassified, where original references are missing, or it is very unclear where the classifications originated. This is leading us to extend effort to observe/analyse stars that fall out of the boundaries of a given project.
As such, we have started a campaign to observe all stars in the Renson Catalogue with the High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS) on the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). We aim, over several years, to collect spectra of the ~4400 stars observable by SALT in the medium resolution mode (R~40000) to build a publicly accessible database of spectra and stellar parameters.
This endeavour will, of course, take time to build a substantial library of spectra, and especially to compete fully, but we wanted to let members of the IAU WG on Ap and Related Stars know that such an effort is being undertaken. While this is not an official IAU WG task, you are welcome to contact me if you have any questions, suggestions or offers of help, directly at daniel.l.holdsworth@gmail.com
With best regards,
Daniel Holdsworth