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AAVSO Reports on the January 2006 AAS Meeting —Thank you to Aaron Price, Matthew Templeton, and Travis Searle for providing the content for this article. The 207th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Washington, D.C. was very exciting this past January. In fact, it was almost overwhelming because of its size -- over 3,500 people attended the meeting, a new record. Like all AAS meetings, the 207th featured a very wide range of sessions covering all areas of astronomy, from the planetary sciences to fundamental cosmology. Many related topics are also incorporated into these meetings, from education and public outreach, to astronautics and space systems engineering, to large-scale computing and database design, to the history of astronomy. Each day began and ended with special lectures and general addresses to the entire gathering, often related to prizes handed out by the AAS.
The meeting was opened with a brief welcome to Washington by D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams who, we were pleased to learn, is an amateur astronomer himself and has been since his youth. In an amusing show of political honesty, Mayor Williams invited us to "get lots of parking tickets" while attending the meeting -- our nation's science budget isn't the only one hurting in D.C., apparently!
Beyond the invited talks there were many topical sessions every day, on nearly every topic under (and including!) the Sun. There was no way to take in everything there was to see, so we all had to pick and choose which sessions to attend. Aaron Price, with press credentials, covered the press conferences, presented 2 posters and gave a short talk. Matthew Templeton attended the scientific talks, presented a poster, and stalked the poster gallery for posters that used your data and observations. And Travis Searle, making his inaugural debut at an AAS meeting, recorded media for our web site and helped work the networking angle in the evenings. All together we helped present your observations and activities to the professional community while also bringing new ideas back to the organization. In the Press Room
 Another friend of the AAVSO was part of a third press conference
that involved variable stars. Dr. Steve Howell is a member of a team
that used the Hubble Space Telescope to directly measure the spectrum
of an accreting white dwarf. They observed the variable star CP Eri,
an AM CVn system with a helium white dwarf. They determined that
CP Eri is likely to become a supernova even before its mass reaches
the Chandrasekhar limit due to compression of Helium on the surface.
Networking Outside of the press room, the action was just as exhilerating. As a result of discussions with colleagues, some new possible projects presented themselves. These include: participation in an effort to build a new robotic telescope in California, performing E/PO duties for a major new observatory under construction, creating a plan for HOA2 including a possible sale of the rest of the AAVSO HOA inventory and a satellite tracking project for amateurs. And finally, a really neat project that will involve the most ambitious observing campaign in AAVSO history was planned. More about that will be announced at the upcoming Spring Meeting. Which, if any, of these possible projects will see fruition is anyone's guess. But it is in these conversations that new programs get started. The High Energy Network and the extrasolar transit campaigns are examples of ideas that had their beginnings at previous AAS meetings.. so stay tuned!
Invited Talks
 Dr. Sally Oey from the University of Michigan was given the honor of being an invited speaker at the meeting. Dr. Oey is a previous winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award, joining
other friends of the AAVSO who have received this award, such as Dr. Paula Skzody
(current AAVSO 1st vice president), Dr. Karen Meech (AAVSO council
member 2002-2004), and Dr. Lee Anne Willson (past AAVSO
president). Dr. Oey specializes in hot, large variable stars. With
her permission, we were able to record her talk (coming soon) and host the PDF
file that supports it. It is relatively advanced so we also recorded
an interview with her to help explain it. We'd like to thank Dr. Oey for taking time out of
her busy schedule to talk to us.
Some of the notable (and/or just plain enjoyable) talks that Matthew Templeton attended included:
Your Contributions The AAVSO was well-represented at the meeting, not just through the attendance of AAVSO staff and members, but by scientists using your data in their research. Most noteworthy, six of the twenty four posters in Session 70 on "Cataclysic Variables and Novae" used or made mention of AAVSO data as part of the presentation -- that's twenty five percent! These posters were:
Other posters using AAVSO data included:
AAVSO Related Talks And of course, many old (and some new!) friends and members of the AAVSO also presented their work at the meeting. Aaron's travel to the meeting was paid for largely by a grant provided by the National Virtual Observatory. He was a member of, and chosen to represent, the team that won a technical award at the 2nd NVO Summer School for their work on the VOEvent messaging protocol (pdf of poster). This is a standard of the VO community to distribute astronomical event and alert messages. The AAVSO will be an important part of this new network with our MyNewsFlash, Special Notice and Alert Notice publications. Aaron also presented a poster about the Slacker Astronomy podcast which he created and runs along with fellow AAVSO staff member Travis Searle and council member Pamela Gay. Additionally, he gave a short talk about the podcast at a paper session titled "Education and Public Outreach With NASA's Great Observatories".
A list of some other presentations by the AAVSO community included: Margarita Karovska (CfA), Steve Howell (NOAO), Robert Wing (Ohio State), Richard Wasatonic (Villanova), William Alexander (James Madison U.), Pamela Gay (Harvard U. Science Center; see this, and this), Bradley Schaefer (Louisiana State U.; see this and this), Geoffrey Clayton (Louisiana State U.), Tim Graves (Sonoma State U.) and the GLAST E/PO Team, Barbara Welther (CfA), and many others. (E-mail us if we left you out!)
Meetings like this are always fun to attend, as much to meet old friends and talk shop with long-distance collaborators as to see all of the great new things happening in the world of astronomical research. We were very pleased to help represent the AAVSO this time, and observers like you should be proud of your hard work and dedication -- great new things are being learned from the data you submit to the AAVSO, and the number and quality of research projects being undertaken using your work continues to grow every year. The Winter and Summer Meetings of the AAS are a perfect venue to share the work of the AAVSO community, and all of us at AAVSO HQ look forward to doing so again in the future! (But pardon us if after all that excitement, we need a nap first....)  Tai-Shan, the baby panda, at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. |
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