Confessions of a Beginner Asteroid Light Curve Photometrist

With an eclipsing binary under my belt, I was now an expert and ready to tackle asteroid light curves--or so I thought. The darn things move! The ref- erence stars are different every night. I have to learn about Landolts and extinction and air mass. But how do I use this new knowledge without taking filtered images, given that filters absorb so much light? Or spending all my time making arcane calculations? And no one ever told me how to mix different night data sets without fudge factors. And my nights are often cloudy, so how do I handle the data to get reliable results? And of course, there was the supernova I discovered (only to find it was an infrared star tricking my camera and me). Join me in a beginner's trials, tribulations, and solutions, as I discuss with examples how I have learned to do asteroid light curves even under lousy Maryland skies.