The Hvar photometry project is a very meritorious, historical undertaking to understand the long-term 
variability of various types of stars. The manuscript describes the project and summarizes the
results obtained for emission-line stars.

It is very worthwhile making the information compiled by the authors available to the general
community, which can make good use of it. For instance, an invited talk at a conference on Be
stars (there may be one next or even this year) or photoelectric photometry could be a good
vehicle. However, I do not think that all this information needs to be published in a scientific
journal such as A&A.

Questions for the editor:
a) The Introduction does not frame a scientific context but gives a somewhat lengthy, yet
patchy, historical account of the Hvar photometry project. It is exclusively about this
project and does not provide any external context. It hardly adds value for the scientific
understanding of the rest of the manuscript. Is this in agreement with the scope of A&A?

b) Table 4 provides valuable information. But photoelectric photometry is a dying art, and so
I am wondering whether A&A wishes to publish data about comparison and check stars
that CCD photometry is not likely to use.
If the editor and the authors accept the main thrust of my comments, their follow-up will require
very major modifications of the manuscript. Therefore, I refrain from making comprehensive minor
comments now. The annotated copy of the manuscript contains some. I recommend them to the
attention of the authors but only request replies to comments made in this report.

General scientific comments to the authors:
1) Please add a simple, short introduction to Be stars and cite the review by Rivinius, Carciofi,
and Martayan.

2) Please add a reference to a paper describing the general methods and principles of
photoelectric photometry.

3) Please purify the sample and retain classical Be stars only, removing unrelated objects like
beta Lyr (or at least split the sample into clearly distinguished subsamples).

4) Please add that the disks around classical Be stars are not due to accretion, as initially
hypothesized by Kriz and Harmanec, but due to decretion. Please cite the pertinent
literature on decretion disks.

5) Please state that the variability seen in the Hvar photometry is entirely circumstellar as the
stellar amplitudes are too low.

6) Please emphasize the continued complementarity of the Hvar photometry to space
photometry: Hvar can provide the long-term context. As can BeSS: please mention the
complementarity of the Hvar photometry and the BeSS spectra.

7) Please provide simple statistics of the amplitudes in V magnitude and U-B and B-V colors.
Ditto for the timescales, ideally combining them with the amplitudes.

8) The main difference between Be and non-Be stars is that Be stars exhibit outbursts while
the latter do not. It surprises that, in the manuscript, there is not a single occurrence of the
word ???outburst???. This requires an explanation since the Hvar photometry is technically
capable of capturing medium and major events.

9) Given the large volume of the data, it would be very attractive to learn more about
correlations and trends. At this moment, the Hvar photometry is still the only database
covering the long-term variability. But the manuscript mostly describes many trees and
appears to neglect the (admittedly complex) forest.


Comments to the authors on specific parts of the paper:
Section 2.1: The pivotal point of the Hvar photometry project is the forthcoming online database.
A detailed description of all methods, etc. must be included with it. In this paper, this informationcan be much coarser. There is no need to repeat here all equations from Harmanec (1994). Please
reduce this section to new information.

Lines 250-259: Is it possible/useful to produce a plot of the extinction as a function of time (hour,
month, year)?

Section 2.3: The accuracy is only evaluated in qualitative terms or presented in graphical form.
But global representative numbers (not just single best examples) are also needed.

Section 3: The description of the variability patterns given at the beginning is relatively useless if it
is not applied to each and every star and also included in Table 6. Some simple statistical
evaluation of the distribution of the types and their compatibility/incompatibility is very desirable.
Section 3, LTEMp and LTEMi: The physical difference should be made clear (referring to the VDD
model ?).

Lines 404-407: Please cite the work by Okazaki: 1997A%26A...318..548O

Line 443, fourth timescale: What is it? What are the other three? Why are quotes sometimes used,
sometimes not?

Section 3: The second author is famous for his command of the literature on Be stars. However, this
paper cannot be a lexicon of Be stars. It is about the Hvar photometry of Be stars. But 80-90% of
the text about individual Be stars has nothing to do with the Hvar photometry. I give some
random examples in the annotated copy of the manuscript; this information should be removed
from the paper since it can be conveniently and safely researched with the ADS and Simbad. Non-
Hvar observations should be mentioned only if the Hvar photometry provides an important
context or confirmation.

Star-specific graphics in Sect. 3: Many appear dispensable because they do not present any
intelligible information. They should be removed. Select examples are Nos. 22, 24, 30, 38, 41, etc.

Lines 1281-1290: How much of the information about the circularity of orbits was obtained through
the Hvar photometry? If the fraction is low, this paragraph should be deleted.

Lines 1291/1292: It would help to present this conclusion graphically.

Figures 55 and 56: It would be very useful to include information about the accompanying
variations in the V band. Please explain in the captions what ???V??? and ???Ia??? for.

Table 5 should definitely not be published in A&A because the usage of these data cannot be
recommended. The online database is a good place for it.

Table 6 or Table 7: As a very important parameter, one would like to see the typical cadence of
the observations. For binaries, the period and eccentricity should be included. It would help to add
any publications heavily relying on Hvar photometry. MK types would be a clear asset.

In summary, I congratulate the authors on this huge piece of careful work. However, in A&A, it
cannot be equally huge. I strongly encourage the authors to trim the text to what is (and cannot
be made) available elsewhere and/or to expand the discussion at the ensemble level.

Dietrich Baade
