Members of the group might like to try for these two YSO's (Young Stellar Objects), easily observable together as they are both bright and just 3 arcminutes apart. Young stars often show Lithium in their photospheres. As the stars progress to the main sequence, convection and straightforward heat destroys it, therefore Lithium is a signature of youth in stars. Both stars are variable but of two different types:
AB Aur: visually, visible with binoculars throughout its range of about 6.8 - 8.5, this is a star of the UXOR type. These objects spend most of their time near maximum but can fade without warning, possibly due to the formation of planetesimals that obscure the parent star. Spectra are from types F and earlier.
SU Aur: another bright object, varying for the greater part of its known history by about half a magnitude from 9 to 9.5. Recently however (2018, - and this week!!) it has faded by over a magnitude and multiwavelength data (from a paper I presented in 2018) suggest the presence of solid material causing these events. A very young star of the T Tauri type, so may well show Lithium abundance. This recent behaviour may point to major planet-forming episodes occurring in the system.
We did a campaign in 2012 on these two stars for Dr. Hans Moritz Guenther, to support his XMM observations of these young stars. Classical T Tau stars tend to be irregularly variable, so every day will look different than the day before. One of the normal issues for CTTS observations is that young stars tend to be in star-forming regions, where most of the nearby stars of similar brightness are also young stars and therefore variable. Be careful when choosing comp stars, and monitor them for variation. There is some nice dark nebulosity just to the NW of these variables, so deep images could be quite pretty.
Arne
Cheers for that Arne. Both AB and SU are attended by little crescent-shaped nebs as well. Your comments about 'variable comps' have already proved a bugbear for the sequence team in the recent campaign for YSOs in the Sco-Lup association, where virtually all the nearby stars in most cases were YSOs themselves!
This is probably more appropriate for the YSO discussion list rather than here, but for what it's worth, I can supply lists of well-vetted stable comps (but not reliable standard magnitudes yet) in some dozens of fields mainly in Taurus that I have been monitoring for the past decade or more. This does not include SU/AB Aur since these are not on the Lowell spectroscopy program, but plenty of other favorites are covered. The comps are selected for CCD imaging, and are not necessarily good for visual observing. Let me know if these are desired.
\Brian