The Araucaria project. Variable stars outside the local group: NGC 300

We have performed a search for variable stars in the Sculptor Group spiral galaxy NGC 300 using wide-field multi-epoch BV photometry up to a limiting magnitude Vsimilar to23. Apart from the Cepheid variables in this galaxy already reported in an earlier paper by Pietrzynski et al. and the variable blue supergiants reported by Bresolin et al., we have identified 26 additional periodic variables, with periods ranging from 0.2 to 190 d, and 121 slow variables. Two of these newly discovered variables are Galactic foreground stars (one of them is a W UMa system), and three correspond to previously identified Wolf-Rayet stars. 16 stars are new Cepheids, and the other objects span a huge range in colours and represent a mixture of different types of luminous variables.