News and Announcements

There is now a sequence available for SN2011B. 

You will need to specify the coordinates (I used 08 55 48.50 +78 13 02.7 from the discovery telegram) to plot a chart, or you can simply download this E scale DSS image chart and print it.

Enjoy!

Nova Sagittarii 2011 = PNV J17474639-2335112

Our Assistant Director, Aaron Price, has had a heck of a year!

Early in 2010, he was made Assistant Director of the AAVSO. Later that year we celebrated his defending his Ph.D. But something more unusual, at least for an AAVSO staffer, was on the horizon.

It would seem to an outside observer, perhaps, that AAVSO staffers are more committed to their work than most. While most of us (but not all) are married, the vast majority of us have no children now. With the single exception of Gloria, those that do have children have grown children.

We received some sad news at the AAVSO ten days ago regarding one of the participants in the AAVSO's project to digitize data from the Harvard Annals. Daniel Rupp wrote me to let me know that his son, Andrew Rupp, passed away on January 7, 2011. Along with this news, Mr. Rupp passed along the spreadsheets that Andrew had in progress. All told, Andrew digitized more than 2700 observations for 10 different Mira variables, extending our light curves for these stars backwards in time by nearly eleven years.

Supernova 2011K in anonymous galaxy is Type-Ia pre-maximum

January 14, 2011: We have been informed by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBET 2636, Daniel W. E. Green, Ed.) that A. J. Drake, California Institute of Technology, et al. report a Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey discovery of a supernova in a faint anonymous galaxy in Catalina Sky Survey unfiltered images on January 13.19 UT at magnitude 15.1.

http://www.aavso.org/ejaavso

January 8, 2011: Dr. Michael David Hicks (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) contacted the AAVSO requesting precision 
photometry of three solar system objects in support of NASA's DAWN mission to Vesta.  These objects, called 
"Vestoids", are near-Earth objects with similar reflectance spectra to Vesta itself, suggesting they may be fragments 
of that larger body.          

http://www.aavso.org/ejaavso

Unusual Behavior of FS Aur - Outburst Imminent?

January 3, 2011: The campaign to monitor activity of the peculiar cataclysmic variable FS Aurigae, as announced in AAVSO Alert Notice 428 (see also AAVSO Special Notice #226), continues. Principal Investigator Dr. Vitaly Neustroev reports that the campaign is going well, and that he is very appreciative of your observing efforts and contributions.

http://www.aavso.org/ejaavso

http://www.aavso.org/ejaavso

http://www.aavso.org/jaavso-v38n2