September 2021

Hello again everyone,

Are you familiar with Citizen Science? Very simply it is a way for non-professionals to participate in advancing scientific knowledge. Are you a bird watcher? You can partake in the Audubon Christmas Day bird count. If you are adept at using a computer you can find many projects that ask you to look at images and report your conclusions. If you Google “Citizen Science” you will learn about many interdisciplinary topics. There was a project that asked people to read ship’s logs and help analyze meteorological information.

But we are Amateur Astronomers. What is our Citizen Science? For 110 years it has been the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). In this day of big scopes and imaging many of us are driven to take wonderful deep sky pictures. But to what end?

AAVSO provides us a place to add our observing efforts to true scientific knowledge. Regardless of the nature of your equipment you can contribute star magnitude estimates to the AAVSO database. What if you were the first person that noticed Betelgeuse was getting just a little dimmer? That’s naked eye variable observing. What if you were taking images of the Milky Way in Lyra at just the time a nova was exploding (  like Ben Mayer did )? That is photographic variable observing. And so on. 

The point of my discussion is to point all of you to a wonderful article in the September issue of Astronomy magazine by Stella Kafka, the AAVSO director. Some of you may remember that she spoke at Astroassembly several years ago. In her article Stella reviews all the ways observers have added to the knowledge of variables. She discusses how observers can use different techniques and equipment in their pursuit of magnitude estimates. She encourages observers to even contribute to the astronomical literature by writing papers in the Journal of the AAVSO. Stella’s article is not bogged down in details. She does not discuss Algol variables or Mira variables or SS Cygni. That is for you to discover when you are bitten by the variable star bug. Pursue it!

In closing I hope to see many of you at AstroAssembly soon. If you can, please come in person. If you prefer, you can join us on Zoom.

Wishing you all clear skies.