Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:56:55 -0500 From: Geoff Gaherty It just seems to me that the high cost of trying to recruit such people would result in a marginal or nil benefit (as you actually > discovered). Yes, there are a few amateurs with the potential to become useful VSO'ers who will require an effort from others to get > them going and then once they're in, they're golden. > In some ways, it could be argued that the more obscure and difficult the organization and the > activity, the more likely you may be to recruit people who have the best chance of staying with it. This is EXACTLY the sort of attitude that drove me away from variable star observing in 1963 and kept me away from it for nearly 40 years! On the other hand, I wonder how many people here know that the original Messier Club was created in the 1940s by Isabel Williamson of the RASC Montreal Centre? She conceived it originally as a training program for variable star observers, where they would learn how to starhop in a fun competitive environment. Remember, back in the 1940s hardly _anyone_ observed deep sky objects. It was all solar system and double stars, with a handful of serious AAVSO'ers observing variables. When I joined the Montreal Centre in 1957, it had one of the most active and varied observational programs of any astronomy club in the world. The Messier Club, supposed training ground for variable star observers, had been in existence for 15 years and was one of the most popular activities in the club. And how many variable star observers were there in the Montreal Centre as a result of this "training"? Exactly ONE: Frank Morgan. There were lots of Montrealers active in the AAVSO at the time, at least two serving as president, but they were into solar observing, lunar occultation timing (then part of AAVSO), and nova search. Isabel tried a more focused variable star training program in 1963, which got me involved for about a month, but then I hit the vacuum in Headquarters of the day, which was like a black hole where you submitted observations but never got any feedback whatsoever. I don't think any serious observers came out of that program. It was only when young David Levy came along that the Montreal Centre got their second serious variable star observer, and I suspect he largely did that on his own (by then I'd gone off to grad school in Toronto and lost touch). Geoff Geoff Gaherty GHT Foxmead Observatory Coldwater, Ontario, Canada http://www.gaherty.ca _______________________________________________