HD 116763 - a false alarm?

The southern cool Ap star HD 116763 has recently been proposed by Matthews et al. (1988 Publs. astr. Soc. Pacif., 100,255) to be a possible rapidly oscillating Ap star. We present 11.2 hr of high-speed photometric observations obtained on four nights in 1988 July which fail to confirm the presence of oscillations. We present an independent frequency analysis of the data of Matthews et al. which leads to the conclusion that the proposed pulsation frequencies are probably spurious. (author)