October 31, 2017: Further to AAVSO Alert Notice 603, your positive observations of CI Aql, which will be used to determine whether the HST observation of CI Aql will take place, must be submitted to the AAVSO International Database by 14:45 UT (10:45 am EDT) on Wednesday, 2017 November 1. Without these positive ground-based observations reported by this time (and showing CI Aql not in outburst), the HST observation will not take place.
October 27, 2017 : Further to AAVSO Alert Notice 599, Dr. Edward Sion (Villanova University) informs us that the HST COS observation of the recurrent nova CI Aql has been scheduled for November 2, 2017.
October 17, 2017: BRITE-Constellation (http://www.brite-constellation.at), a network of nano-satellites, is currently taking photometric observations of the Taurus field (full target list and field specifications given http://brite.craq-astro.ca/doku.php?id=taui). Within this field is CE Tau, a red supergiant with significant (0.5 mag) variations over timescales of months. Dr.
October 10, 2017: Dr. Hauke Wörpel (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP)) has requested AAVSO assistance in obtaining observations of the eclipsing intermediate polar (IP) candidate V902 Mon in support of an XMM-Newton observation scheduled for 2017 October 14, 14:42 UT (duration 43,000s).
AAVSO Newsletter Number 74 (October 2017) has been published and is online. AAVSO members may download a high- or low-resolution version from here. This issue will be available to non-members when the next issue (Number 75, January 2018) is published.
October 1, 2017 : Further to AAVSO Alert Notice 589, the likely windows for the Chandra and HST observations of the symbiotic variable R Aqr have been set as follow:
Chandra: 2017 October 11 - October 15
HST: 2017 October 13
October 1, 2017 : Dr. Edward Sion (Villanova University) has requested AAVSO observers' assistance in monitoring the recurrent nova CI Aql in support of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph scheduled for October 30 - November 6, 2017. These observations are part of a study on short orbital period recurrent novae as Supernovae Type Ia progenitors.
The AAVSO DSLR Observing Manual is now available in Polish!
Thanks to an excellent volunteer effort by Ewa Stokłosa and Ryszard Biernikowicz with editing help from Krzysztof Kida, we now have a beautiful translation of the DSLR Manual into Polish. We hope that our Polish-speaking members and observers will find this manual helpful and will share it with their colleagues.
