DIRECT DISTANCES TO NEARBY GALAXIES USING DETACHED ECLIPSING BINARIESAND CEPHEIDS - II - VARIABLES IN THE FIELD M31A

We have undertaken a long-term project, DIRECT, to obtain the direct d istances to two important galaxies in the cosmological distance ladder -M31 and M33-using detached eclipsing binaries (DEBs) and Cepheids. Wh ile rare and difficult to detect, DEBs provide us with the potential t o determine these distances with an accuracy better than 5%. The exten sive photometry obtained in order to detect DEBs provides us with good light curves for the Cepheid variables. These are essential to the pa rallel project to derive direct Baade-Wesselink distances to Cepheids in M31 and M33. For both Cepheids and eclipsing binaries, the distance estimates will be free of any intermediate steps. As a first step in the DIRECT project, between 1996 September and 1997 January we obtaine d 36 full nights on the Michigan-Dartmouth-MIT Observatory 1.3 m teles cope and 45 full/partial nights on the F. L. Whipple Observatory 1.2 m telescope to search for DEBs and new Cepheids in the M31 and M33 gala xies. In this paper, second in a series, we present the catalog of var iable stars, most of them newly detected, found in the field M31A [(al pha, delta)=(11.degrees 34, 41.degrees 73), J2000.0]. We have found 75 variable stars: 15 eclipsing binaries, 43 Cepheids, and 17 other peri odic, possible long-period or nonperiodic variables. The catalog of va riables, as well as their photometry and finding charts, is available via anonymous ftp and the World Wide Web. The CCD frames are available upon request.