Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:20:18 -0500
From: "David Williams" <dwilliams

I think there's something in what Frank says, that the best kinds of
recruits for VSOing are "naturals" who want to do something worthwhile
and only need to discover AAVSO as the channel for reporting
nova search program all by his lonesome, and when he didn't immediately
find any novae he began to pay attention to the many variable stars that
appeared when he blinked his photo pairs.  He got in touch with nearby
AAVSO members, and when his eclipsing binary discoveries got
interesting, he decided to get into photoelectric photometry so he could
observe them himself, and that inevitably led to CCD observing.  In no
case did Dan start by reading a flyer or hearing a talk about how he
could observe variable stars for fun and science.  He went looking for
fun and science and discovered (pun intended) variable stars.

The best bait for the type of recruit we are looking for: light curves!
All kinds of light curves, the more the better.  The intriguing shapes
immediately arouse the curiosity of the amateur with science potential,
and when the caption says the light curve is compiled from magnitude
estimates made by amateurs with backyard telescopes, these folks are
going to think, "I can do that too!".

David B. Williams

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