Arne A. Henden

Welcome to another edition of the AAVSO Newsletter! Summer is one of my favorite seasons, as everything botanic has come to life, with flowers and fragrances tantalizing me every step of my walk to work. I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of clear nights in the Boston area, though I've found in my career that most places have more clear weather than their detractors would lead you to believe!

I'd like to give you some highlights since the last Newsletter. Most of these have occurred under the watchful eye of our Interim Director, Elizabeth Waagen, whom I am grateful to have sitting only a few feet from my office. It has been a very active period:

• We passed through the Trials and Tribulations period, from the illness and passing of Janet Mattei, through the inspired leadership of Elizabeth Waagen, to the hiring of a new Director. Hopefully we will be on a steady course for a while, with no more storms!
• The Validation Project was completed, with nearly 10 million observations through the 2001 calendar year checked and placed on-line. The more recent observations are being validated as an ongoing effort.
• Wayne Lowder's 95,000 observations were processed and are now available.
• A.W. Robert's 250,000 South African observations have been nearly digitized and will be available on-line later this year, thanks to the continuing efforts of Boyden Observatory and the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa.
• Approximately 12 million observations have been submitted to the AAVSO International Database.
• Over 3400 requests for AAVSO data have been processed.
• The cataloguing of approximately 60,000 comparison stars on over 4,000 AAVSO charts has been completed by the comparison star database team.
• Hundreds of new and revised charts have been placed on the web.
• A new automated chart plotting program is in preparation, to be released later this year.
• 6 Variable Star of the Season presentations have been created.
• A joint meeting, AstroCon 2004, was held among AL, ASP, ALPO, AAVSO, and three local astronomical societies.
• The Third High Energy Astrophysics Workshop was held in Las Cruces, NM.
• The 94th Spring Meeting was held in Las Cruces, NM.
• 133 new members were added to our organization.
• The internet connection was upgraded to 1.5Mbps, tripling our data rate.
• The electronic version of the JAAVSO was begun; several issues of the hardcopy journal were printed and distributed.
• Many observing campaigns were held, from studying cataclysmic variables such as Var Her 04 and BZ UMa through exoplanet transit studies of TrES-1.
• Peranso, the premier period-searching software program, was made available at no charge to AAVSO members through an agreement with its author.
• The Thursdays Chat Room was begun.
• Work was begun to incorporate all RR Lyr and Eclipsing Binary observations into the International Database.
• A gamma-ray burst afterglow was discovered by an AAVSO member, and many other afterglows observed by members of the High Energy Network.
• The Janet A. Mattei Research Fellowship Program was created.

Internet Activity and the Web Site
The new web site continues to see increased activity. Kate Davis developed an online store section that has been very helpful in promoting our for-sale items. Over 2 million page downloads occurred during this period, with an increase to 377MB of data per day transferred. An online book auction was held, with the proceeds given to the JAM Research Fellowship fund.

A new observing campaign web page was created by Kate. This page has both a timeline graph at the top indicating what campaigns are in progress, as well as details for each campaign given below.

AAVSO-interest pages were enhanced over the last reporting period, with the addition of a "What's new at HQ" section which includes short staff biographies and pictures as well as directions, a virtual tour of the HQ building, and news items.

Of course, the number of downloaded charts and quick-look accesses continues to increase exponentially.

Observations
Over 700,000 observations have been reported in the last 18 months. These continue to come from both domestic and international observers, with now nearly an equal split between visual and CCD observers.

The top countries continue to be France, Australia, and Belgium. Lew Cook dominated the observers with over 70,000 CCD observations during the period. Many visual observers contributed over 10,000 observations apiece, however, including Mike Simonsen and Rod Stubbings. The quality of data from everyone continues to improve, especially now with the revised charts that are available on the Web.

Publications
In addition to the JAAVSO printings mentioned above, we published the 2005 AAVSO Bulletin (Predicted Dates of Maxima and Minima of 561 Long-Period Variables), Alert Notices, News Flashes, CCD Views, Ephemerides for Eclipsing Binaries and RR Lyrae Stars, etc. We recently revived Eyepiece Views and updated the PEP Newsletter. In addition, some 40 journal publications were made with staff assistance or included amateur AAVSO members, including:

• Templeton, M.R., Mattei, J.A., and Willson, L.A., "Secular Evolution in Mira Variable Pulsations," 2005, AJ, in press.
• Price, C. A. et al., "A New Cataclysmic Variable in Hercules," 2004, PASP 116, 1117.
• Smak, J., and Waagen, E.O., "The 1985 Superoutburst of U Geminorum. Detection of Superhumps," 2004, AcA 54, 433.
• Martin, J.C., and Koppelman, M. D., "Eta Carina's Brightness Variations Since 1998: Hubble Space Telescope Observations of the Central Star," 2004, AJ 127, 2352.

The GRB Network
The AAVSO High Energy Network now encompasses all variable targets with gamma-ray or X-ray emission, including GRB afterglows, active galactic nuclei, and polars. We have arrangements with the NASA Swift satellite team for gamma-ray follow-ups, and campaigns with the GLAST Telescope Network in support of their upcoming mission. The two major events were the discovery of the fading afterglow of GRB030725 by Berto Monard, the first amateur discovery; and the extremely bright and long-lasting afterglow for GRB030329, which amateurs followed for over a week, contributing valuable photometry for many professional research papers. This network is being strengthened through a grant from Swift, providing CCD cameras for several active observers (especially in the southern hemisphere), and through a grant from the Curry Foundation, providing filters for many of our observers and inexpensive CCD cameras and travel funds to reach developing countries.

Exoplanets
We have begun a collaboration with TransitSeach to study exoplanet systems. While several of these are already known transiting systems (such as HD248959 and TrES-1), TransitSearch is initiating campaigns with our help on some of the other 150 systems, monitoring for any small deviation in brightness that would be indicative of a transit. Detecting a transit is important as it constrains the geometry of the system and gives us the true mass of the planetary body.

Education and Outreach
The Third HEA workshop was videotaped and a DVD of the sessions is in progress. Most of the PowerPoint presentations from this workshop as well as the scientific paper sessions of the AAVSO meetings are available on the Web. The AAVSO educational curriculum Hands-On Astrophysics: Variable Stars in Math, Science and Computer Education continues to be distributed through the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and our own online store.

A Mira Companions and Planets Symposium was organized in April 2004 and well attended. Another single-day Symposium is being planned for August 2005 on cataclysmic variables.

Planning is underway for more half-day workshops, with visual observing and IRAF data analysis workshops being given at the Fall 2005 annual meeting. Gamze Menali just attended a meeting of Turkish amateur astronomers that was dedicated to the memory of Janet Mattei. We will be attending the major E/PO meeting being organized by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in Tucson this September.

Summary
The organization continues to be strong and healthy. We are actively pursuing new grant possibilities to further enhance our research and outreach activities. Internal changes are occurring to improve the efficiency of the staff, effectively increasing the number of people supporting the membership at no cost. By next Newsletter, we hope to report many more exciting enhancements. It is a great time to be a variable-star enthusiast!

—Arne

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