From The Director

It’s been a very busy and very fruitful fiscal year thus far, starting with our 86th Annual Meeting in Chicopee and South Hadley, Massachusetts, hosted by Ron Zissell and Tom Dennis from Mount Holyoke College. Our meeting there was extremely successful, featuring a wide range of scientific papers and a very interesting workshop on the relationship of visual photoelectric V and CCD V magnitudes. On Friday night we had a very interesting talk on the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) given by Dr. Michael Skrutskie, and we had the opportunity to observe at Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College. It was a very informative and wonderful meeting, with lots of visiting among old and new friends in attendance.

Then in June we had our 87th Spring Meeting in Boulder, Colorado, hosted by Irene and Steve Little, Catharine Garmany, Gary and Paula Emerson, and Ed and Jane Halbach. This meeting was filled with fascinating field trips to Gary’s observatory and to the world’s highest observatory at Mount Evans. An interesting scientific session and beautiful weather in the Rockies made this meeting a special and very productive one.

Our year in general has been a very busy one. I would like to share with you a brief summary of the semi-annual report that I presented at the AAVSO meeting in Boulder.

The computerization of monthly data that we receive by mail, fax, and e-mail is up to date. In addition to the monthly observations, a significant number of observers worldwide send their observations nightly to the AAVSO so the data can be included in the AAVSO News Flash.

We continue to respond to data requests, disseminate information electronically and through our web site, and distribute publications such as the AAVSO Circular, Alert Notice, and News Flash, along with computer software developed at the AAVSO, thanks to our direct Internet connection through NASA Astrophysics and NASA Science Internet.

We fully recognize the power of the Internet, and to fulfill our goals for its use we have recently hired Aaron Price, an experienced webmaster and a hardware and software specialist.

Among the many activities we have focused on this year is the redesign of our website, making it more helpful and informative to the user. Along these lines, we have put all of our standard AAVSO finder charts on the web—some 1,100 of them—so that these charts can now be downloaded by anyone who can access the web. We are in the process of scanning the preliminary charts to put on the web in the coming year. In addition, we have successfully automated most of the processes of producing light curves to post on the Internet, and we expect soon to be able to show a light curve of any star in our program for which we have data in our database.

I am very happy to report that the AAVSO’s major educational project, Hands-On Astrophysics: Variable Stars in Science, Math, and Computer Education (HOA), was completed this spring. We have been running an advertisement, such as the one on page 5, in a number of astronomical publications, generating good responses. We have already held an HOA workshop in partnership with the Wright Center at Tufts University. The 38 teachers from around the country who attended this workshop were very enthusiastic about HOA and all of its parts. We have a very attractive Hands-On Astrophysics website that can be accessed through the AAVSO website at http://www.aavso.org.

We will soon be adding a significant set of online resources for astronomy education to the AAVSO website as part of our HOA program. We also have some very exciting ideas for the coming year for our website, and we are well underway to making the AAVSO website a prime source of information and tools for a broad segment of the astronomical community—our members, educators, and astronomers.

As we prepare for our 87th Annual Meeting this month in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we are looking forward to a new fiscal year in which we will focus our attention on publishing our long-term data, publishing a revised manual for observing variable stars, promoting HOA as widely as we can, and expanding our website so that it serves our members and the astronomical community in the most effective ways possible.

Many thanks to each of you for your contributions and support. I look forward to a fulfilling and fruitful fiscal year.

Janet A. Mattei