The AAVSO
I am a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). This all started about 8 years ago when I was doing a lot of astro-imaging. I started out with traditional film in a traditional camera attached to my telescope and then later got an astronomical digital camera (CCD) to take pretty pictures. I got a book called The Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing, normally referred to as AIP. It is a very good book about using a CCD camera for various things, such as imaging, photometry and spectroscopy, as well as all the issues common to all, such as calibration.
What led me to the AAVSO was the chapter on photometry, which is when you measure the brightness of objects, specifically stars in this case. This seems rather dull at face value but when you dig in a bit it turns out that there is a ton you can learn about stars from this simple technique. Even though professionals have multi-million dollar telescopes they cannot look at all the stars all the time. This is where amateur groups like the AAVSO come in.
But I’m not here to write about the AAVSO, you can read all about that yourself at the AAVSO web site. I’m here to write about what a great bunch of people I’ve been lucky enough to hang out with because of that chapter in the AIP book. I have gone to a half-dozen AAVSO meetings and it is tremendous fun. The best part, of course, is hanging out in the bar after the meeting. While most of our talk is centered around astronomy, we just plain ol’ have fun, joking around and enjoying each other’s company.
Someday, perhaps, I will have a PhD in astrophysics and I’ll putter around some university somewhere teaching people to love astronomy by understanding it while, hopefully, making whatever contributions I can to the scientific record. Should that day come it will be due in large part to the people of the AAVSO.
Sunday, May 7, 2006