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I looked at the 'Geschichte und Literatur' volumes regarding this
star. The original observations (and evidently practically all that
exist of the star qua variable) were by de Sitter around the turn of the
last century and are a mixed bag of visual observations by himself and
Innes in South Africa, and photographic observations from Cape plates.
My suggestion would be that the nominal variability that led to
the designation is completely spurious and comes from the vagaries of
the mixing of visual and photographic data when the whole business was
very poorly understood. Tellingly, the 'GuL' has only one other set
of just six observations (by Hoffmeister) in later volumes, suggesting
the star was of no interest to any one, probably because it isn't
variable---or not variable in the way stated.
The modern photometric data (specifically Tycho-2 and 2MASS)
indicate a little-reddened star near A0. Such a star might have
variations of very small (~0.01 mag.) amplitude, but not likely with
the couple-magnitudes and 300-day period suggested a hundred years ago.
I presume this star is in the comfortable range of brightness for
ASAS3, which (I fearlessly predict) will show the star to be constant.
\Brian
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