AAVSO 92nd Spring Meeting

In lieu of our standard meeting report we are happy to include the contributions of AAVSO members Richard Huziak and Robert Stine. Here, they share their own individual highlights of the 92nd AAVSO Meeting in Tucson.

A Rewarding Spring Meeting, To Say the Least!
By Richard Huziak (HUZ)
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Rick at the Grand Canyon

Anyway, I had planned to attend the Spring Meeting for more reasons than just the certificate, and decided that this minor setback should not dull my enthusiasm of meeting the AAVSO crew for the very first time. I also had some chart and database issues I wanted to discuss in person anyway. So, with a week left before the meeting, Vance and I packed the van with 30 inches of telescopes and began the long drive south. Our plan was simple. Drive until it was dark, observe until the sun came up, sleep until it was too hot, then drive until it was dark and repeat the process until we would eventually arrive in Tucson.

So, that’s what we did. We had some awesome nights of observing in Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. Strangely enough, we even ran across Belgian AAVSO meeting attendees Josch Hambsch and Eric Broens (BOS) not just once but twice on the way; in Dixie National Forest and at Bryce Canyon, Utah. We didn’t realize who each other was until we met at Flagstaff Observatory the next day! Both times I had been tempted to talk to them, since in the forest they were standing beside their car looking up, but I decided not to! The world is truly a small place and full of lost chances!

The pre-meeting tours of the Flagstaff Observatories at Mars Hill and Anderson Mesa and the U. S. Naval Observatory with Brian Skiff and Arne Henden were excellent. By the time we had arrived in Tucson and toured the Steward Mirror Lab and Kitt Peak National Observatory, I had even forgotten about my 25,000 woe. With the Meteor Crater, Grand Canyon, and a Star Night at David Levy’s house thrown in for good measure, this was shaping up to be an absolutely awesome trip!

The AAVSO meeting put the icing on the cake. This being my first meeting, I was uncertain what to expect, but the meeting turned out to be much better that I had imagined. In fact, it was just great! The presentations by the AAVSO members were amazing – the work that these guys do is of the highest quality. It’s hard to imagine that they are just enthusiastic amateurs. Presentations from, and the support given to us by, professional astronomers Janet Mattei, Brian Skiff, Arne Henden, and Lee Ann Willson were absolutely inspiring. The food was good, too! Lots of coffee was also appreciated, since Vance and I really didn’t alter our observing schedule just because we were at the convention. (As a matter of fact I made 145 variables star estimates during the conference and knocked off several dozen far-south deep sky wonders).

92nd Spring Meeting attendees gather outside of the hotel in Tucson, Arizona, for the traditional group photo.

However, the biggest surprise of the conference came at the Annual Banquet. As the names of those who DID get their awards accepted their certificates, I applauded politely, choking down my slightly sour grapes, thinking of next year in Oakland ! Then Janet took the stage, and began reading off a citation, naming off a list of projects and observing numbers that sounded alarmingly familiar to what I had been doing over the last year! My heart sank as she announced that the Director’s Award was to be presented to Gary Poyner (PYG) of the UK (very deserving!) and then…me! I was shocked. This was indeed an honour – very unexpected. But it quickly explained why it took Aaron a week to answer the simple inquiry. He and Janet wanted to answer my ‘25,000 certificate’ question, but didn’t want to spill the beans about the other (far more awesome) award! My acceptance speech was mostly incoherent mumblings of surprise, as far as I can remember! But the grapes now tasted much, much better!

However, what I really wanted to say in the speech was an expansion of Janet’s kind citation. She mentioned that I had a few major projects on the go, and the award was in recognition of these initiatives. Some of these I will explain.

One was my 24,800+ observations submitted to date. Variable star observing is not a race - it is a passion, but all the same it is nice to receive recognition for the effort. Yet I’m sure that every last one of us observe simply because we love the stars, and nothing more!

A good percentage of my 24,800+ observations are of “Suspected Variables”. The “discovery” of suspects in the Validation File got my interests going in many directions. Besides the hundreds of LPVs, SRs, Cepheids, RRs, that I do monthly from my light-polluted backyard, I also add a few hundred estimates of Suspected Variables. From this also comes a large project of identifying each and every one of the thousands of suspects in the Validation File and then trying the determine which are truly variable and which are just ageless typographical errors. To do this properly, I have reviewed every one of the thousands of AAVSO charts north of –36 degrees (my effective horizon), have plotted all suspects on these charts, and will, over the next year or two, cross-reference these to GSC stars so that they will be identified for all eternity. Out of this came a project to correct all the errors (over 100) found on the charts during the review, and to identify variable suspects that are currently being used as supposedly non-variable comparison stars! Out of this will become data that will supplement the future the Variable Star Database projects that AAVSO Headquarters and others such as Vance Petriew (PVA) and Mike Simonsen (SXN) are envisioning and working toward.

As if I don’t have enough to do, our Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) Internet discussion group (called “RASClist”) sometimes decays into a very annoying cacophony of way-off-the-topic whinings about everything EXCEPT observing the sky. (I’m sure other discussion lists do this too, but the RASClist is near to my heart and the lifeline of our national organization.) Thinking that the 4760 members of the RASC could do better, I challenged the discussion group to get off their keyboard duffs and back to the eyepiece. I had noticed in the AAVSO’s Annual Report that only 24 Canadians had reported observations to the AAVSO in the year 2001. I knew we could do better. With a program called the “Great Canadian Observing Challenge” (http://prana.usask.ca/~rasc/The_Great_Canadian_Observing_Challenge.htm), I challenged these keyboard punchers to a dual of exchanged observations. Basically, if they would observe and report just ONE variable observation to the AAVSO in the next year, I would observe anything they challenged me to, in any astronomical category, and write an article about it to boot. They make one meaningful observation to the benefit of the AAVSO, I might have to make 100! I thought that was fair, and hopefully inspiring. (See the webpage as to why I thought that one observation was good enough – like Lay’s Chips, one is never enough!).

Janet Mattei, Richard Huziak, and Dan Kaiser after the award presentation

I must thank Janet for her kind citation and for the Director’s Award. It was a completely unexpected surprise, and just for doing what I love to do! I am tickled pink! And thanks to any of the anonymous people in the background involved in the award nomination.

Beside this award, I have come back with many new friends and fond memories. Meeting Janet, Aaron, Rebecca, fellow Canadian David Levy, Marv Baldwin, and the dozens of others I have known only through books, magazines, and impersonal email was just awesome. Something I was looking forward to for years and managed to accomplish was to tour American Australian Tom Cragg around the night sky with my scope during the Kitt Peak tour. I managed to return the favor Tom had done for me on top of the mountain at the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Coonabarabran, NSW, 17 years earlier, when he opened the Southern Sky to me with an all-nighter of viewing through his 12.5”. I will never forget those views. Thanks again, Tom!

The drive home was a 35-hour all-night marathon, since both Vance and I had to be back at work on the Tuesday after the meeting. Despite the hectic drive, I couldn’t resist making a dozen estimates from the moving van from just outside of Denver with a pair of 7 x 35 binoculars I found under the passenger seat. I finally arrived back in Saskatoon at 7:30 pm on Monday. I entered my house to a ringing phone with the familiar question: “Are you going out to the Sleaford Observatory tonight?” How could I resist with a beautifully blue clear sky overhead? But the gig was up after I fell asleep not once, but twice on my feet at the eyepiece. The second time, I woke up about half way to the ground. Maybe it was time to take a night off!

Mutiny on Kitt Peak

The first full day of Spring Meeting activity included a bus trip to tour the Kitt Peak National Observatory. AAVSO’ers found themselves in observatory paradise, a mountain peak festooned with over twenty telescopes and domes of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and purposes. For some, it was sensory overload, which perhaps explains the despicable event that followed, an event in which this respondent reluctantly and shamefully admits to being a participant.

You see, as night fell and the beautiful Arizona sky began to reveal its celestial treasure trove, we were privileged to observe through the Visitor Center’s twenty-something-inch Ritchey-Chretian telescope. The views were stunning, and the line grew and wound around the inside of the dome and down the stairway as the word spread that good observing was to be had. And indeed good it was. It was a bit humorous to hear seasoned observers gasp in delight as this marvelous scope revealed the finest view of Saturn many of us had ever seen. I am not a Saturn expert, but I can tell you that the Cassini division looked like an interstate highway.People clamored for second looks. The line grew. It was good. So far.

But then it came time for the bus to take us back to Tucson. Our intrepid meeting coordinator, Ms. Rebecca Pellock, began to round people up to board the bus for the trip home. Nearly all obliged. But some of us wanted to continue observing with the R-C and, well, we gave Rebecca a bit of a hard time. In fact, it was mutiny. And it was ill advised, as we mutineers would soon find out.

At this point the reader should know that the very kind Ms. Pellock, our leader, had not had the most fun of days because a mix-up in communication with the Visitor Center meant that our evening meals were not on the mountain, as originally planned! So, in order that all of us could have our sunset meal (a sunset that included a “green flash”), Miss Rebecca and the bus driver had to make the arduous trip back to Tucson and have the meals prepared at the hotel and brought back to the mountain top. This was being done while the rest of us were enjoying the afternoon, oblivious to the ongoing travail in procuring our evening victuals.

Was it wise to mutiny against a Captain who was having such a day? Nope. Nevertheless, we did. Miss Rebecca did not argue. She did not cajole. She didn’t have the time or energy to waste on mutineers. She just walked away, and we thought we had won some more time at the eyepiece. What we did not know is that Miss Rebecca deployed the ultimate weapon - Aaron, The Enforcer! The next thing we mutineers in the dome knew, Rebecca’s soft sweet supplications had been replaced by the booming, demanding, and fearsome voice of The Enforcer.

The mutiny folded like a cheap tent and the humiliated mutineers skulked to the bus like scolded puppies.

Yes, I was one of those mutineers. I shamefully confess. I don’t know who the other mutineers were, for the very same darkness that revealed the stars concealed their identities. Only they know who they are, and they will have to live with their consciences.

So, my advice to future first timers at AAVSO Meeting is: Don’t mess with Rebecca and don’t mess with Aaron. Play nice.

Awards and Recognition

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