Saturday June 6, 2015 - AAVSO Spring Meeting (Part 1)

  I joined the American Association of Variable Star Observers in June, 1984, right after graduating from LaPorte High School. I contributed about 350 estimates when I could (since I was also attending IU and didn't have access to my 6" Newtonian) between then and 1991. Then I sort of dropped out for a decade. After finishing college, throughout the 1990's, I was mainly living in apartments on the Indianapolis south side with no telescope and, really, no place to observe. After Adrian and I finally bought our home in 2001, and I had a fairly dark back yard to observe from and my 6" telescope back, I re-joined the AAVSO. I've kept my membership up through now and I've made about 1,600 other estimates since then.

  The AAVSO is one of the oldest amateur astronomy organizations still in existence; founded in 1911. It's also still one of the best ways for observers with telescopes (or even binoculars) to contribute important data to science. The idea behind the AAVSO was that since professional astronomers didn't have constant access to telescopes and couldn't focus all of their time monitoring the behavior of variable stars, they could instead recruit amateurs to gather the data on the brightness changes of these stars. The variable stars were identified and charts of these stars along with nearby stars of constant brightness were created. Amateurs could then record the magnitude of these variables (along with the constant stars used, chart used, and date and time) and send these reports to the headquarters of the organization.

  Visual observing was the "norm" through most of the AAVSO's history. Some brightness estimates were also obtained through photography. By the 1960's and 1970's, photoelectric photometers were used more and more, and then by the 1980's and especially 1990's more amateurs started using CCD imaging and computer software to obtain very accurate magnitude estimates. Since CCD cameras became popular, the number of estimates in the AAVSO database skyrocketed. When I joined in 1984 there were just a few million estimates stored over the last seventy three years. In 2015 the number had surpassed 28 million data points.

  I briefly tried to learn how to do CCD observing back in 2010. Arne Henden (the Director) arranged the loan of a camera to me. At first, bad winter weather kept me from using it at all. By the time spring arrived I had one night where I tried it out on my 10" scope, using the Moon as a target. But I realized that night that the telescope's focusing mount didn't have the traveling length to let the camera focus, and I also found out that the mount's drive had stopped working, and I wasn't sure how to fix that. In the end, I thanked Arne and the people at headquarters for the loan, but I packed it up and sent it back to them, defeated. It looked like I'd remain a visual observer for quite a while longer.

  There's been a big debate going on over the last 15 years about the value of observing variable stars visually versus the value of observing them through photometry and CCD imaging. Plus, there are also automatic sky surveys in place now, where most of the night sky is often imaged every few nights from robotic telescopes in dark sky locations. Data on variable stars is gathered automatically with these surveys. CCD imaging provides detailed and extremely accurate data on individual stars. Visual observing often seems obsolete. It's often made me reconsider my AAVSO membership.

  In the end, I've become convinced that there's still a lot of value to making visual estimates and sending these in to the AAVSO. The automatic surveys depend on funding, and aren't always online gathering data. They don't cover the whole sky. While CCD imaging is far more accurate than making brightness estimates by eye, the CCD observers tend to concentrate on just one star per night or just a few. Visual observers can cover dozens of variable stars, and they don't need to spend time deriving a star's magnitude with computer software.

  Also, partly thanks to my correspondence over the last few years with (AAVSO member) Mike Poxon in the UK, I've realized that visual observers can fill some "niches" that aren't covered by those preprogrammed all-sky surveys or CCD imagers. Mike turned me on to observing Young Stellar Objects mainly because these stars can exhibit quick surges and fades in brightness that happen too fast for the surveys to document thoroughly, and many of them aren't covered by the observers using CCD imaging. In addition to this, there seemed to be a lot of Eclipsing Binary Stars that seem to be neglected by all observers, and that might show brightness changes outside of the predicted eclipses. I've started a personal list of these stars to observe. Mike's new program of observing "Algols that might be UXOR's" that we've discussed through email this year seems to combine both of these special interests. (I'll try to describe this in more detail in another entry.)

  The AAVSO has two annual meetings per year. In the fall they've almost always met at the Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Spring meetings are held in various locations in and out of the USA. I realized, in March, that this year the annual spring meeting would happen at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana ... just a little over an hour away from the Indianapolis south side! This was the closest meeting that I'd ever seen. And I was kicking myself! I'd started 2015 with a lot of paid days off at work, but I didn't have many left after February (because of the partial shutdown at the plant caused by the dock strike on the West Coast, and illness). The meeting was going to take place from Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6. All I could really hope for was to attend some of the Saturday events. And Saturday the 6th was also Adrian's birthday! It looked like I'd miss out again.

  However, after talking to Adrian about it, she told me she'd be interested in going. I did some email correspondence with Rebecca Turner at AAVSO Headquarters, explaining my situation, and she offered us a reduced rate for just Saturday late afternoon and evening. By early May I completed the online registration and paid the fee. This was exciting! It had been over 30 years since I first joined. The only other member I'd ever met face-to-face was Mark Bradbury (BMK) in Greenwood, and this had been by coincidence since he'd ended up working at CTB with me when I was employed there. This would be my first chance ever to talk to some people I'd only emailed before. I was really looking forward to it, even though we'd only be able to attend the late Saturday events.