Historical light curves provide an interesting study of the long-term behavioral changes exhibited in some stars. The AAVSO is a unique resource for variable star research because it contains millions of variable star observations dating back to before the organization was founded in 1911.
The Norwich Bulletin, of Norwich, Ct., published an article about AAVSO co-founder William Tyler Olcott in their blog focused on the history of the town. It includes interesting tidbits about Mr. Olcott, references to the AAVSO and proposals for ways to commemorate him.
The purpose of this project is to document the history of the Information Technology Infrastructure of the AAVSO, how it came to be, what hardware was used, who were the people involved, and how the technology was used to further the mission of variable star observing and analysis.
The Advancing Variable Star Astronomy book that chronicles the first 100 years of the AAVSO is now available as an Amazon Kindle e-book. Of course, hard copies are still available from the AAVSO for $80 (20% discount), while supplies last.
The AAVSO's volunteer-driven project to digitize paper archives of variable star observations is moving forward, and there have been some exciting developments over the past few months that deserve to be mentioned. Here, I'll summarize some of the happenings in this project, and talk about some of the issues that have arisen at AAVSO and among the volunteers.
This is part of our ongoing series to highlight new features of the new AAVSO web site.
Matt Templeton scanned all of the abstracts and put them online in PDF format. The abstracts cover items presented at meetings, but often include much more info than a modern day abstract. For example, the last issue includes abstracts that are over 3 pages long, meeting memories, history of the AAVSO articles and even a poem! Here is his description of the abstracts from the first paragraph on the web page:
The Advancing Variable Star Astronomy book that chronicles the first 100 years of the AAVSO is now available as an Amazon Kindle e-book. Of course, hard copies are still available from the AAVSO for $80 (20% discount), while supplies last.