High speed photometry of AN UMa

As a class, the AM Her objects exhibit temporal variability on time scales ranging from seconds to years. Most of the variations can be adequately described by ''shot noise'' models (Cordova and Mason 1982). Exceptions to this are the strictly periodic features modulated on the orbital periods of the systems (typically several hours) and the one to two second features which show up as ''excesses'' of power in the time averaged power spectra of AN UMa (Middleditch 1982) and E1405-451 (Mason et al. 1983; Larsson 1985). It has been suggested that the short time scale features are due to an oscillatory ''instability'' of radiative accretion shocks discovered by Langer, Chanmugam, and Shaviv (1981, 1982). This is an interesting suggestion because, if true, it would allow the masses of the accreting white dwarfs to be inferred and would provide other significant constraints on the physics of the accretion flows (see Langer et al. 1981, 1982; Chevalier and Imamura 1982; Imamura, Wolff, and Durisen 1984; Imamura 1985). Unfortunately, a direct physical relationship between the one to two second optical variations and shock oscillations has not yet been demonstrated. Because of the potential importance of such a result further study of these systems is clearly warranted. In this work, we examine the short time scale behavior of AN UMa in more detail and improve on the work of Middleditch (1982) by resolving the feature in time