[Aavso-photometry] Blazars

[Michael Koppelman]

I'm taking a class on the structure and evolution of galaxies. We are  
required to do a presentation at the end of the semester and I  
decided to do mine on blazars. Being an observational astronomer of  
the amateur variety, I thought it would be fun to include my own data  
in the presentation. (I find that young undergraduate students in  
astronomy are rarely observationally focused.) As you may or may not  
know the AAVSO has a blazar program.

See:
http://www.aavso.org/observing/programs/hen/blazar.shtml

with charts here:
http://www.aavso.org/observing/charts/ccd.shtml

I see there are some dedicated observers working on these objects and  
the long term coverage is actually getting quite good.

I bring this to your attention because I would appreciate time-series  
observations of these objects to include with my own in my  
presentation. My thought was to report on intra-night variations of  
these objects. As an example, I got some data on Mark 421 and found  
the standard deviation in the magnitudes was 4 times higher for this  
object than the surrounding comparison stars. Bruce Gary, on the top  
AAVSO link above, has a nice report on the capabilities of amateurs  
to measure intra-night variations.

It is unlikely that this will result in anything publishable, but you  
never know.

If you want to participate all I ask is that you submit your  
observations normally to the AAVSO and email me so I can correlate  
our data.

Thanks!
Michael Koppelman
http://www.lolife.com/astronomy/