Arne A. Henden

It is the holiday season again, and appropriately, I'm watching the first major Boston snowstorm of the year from my office window. Freshly falling snow is so pretty and really gets you into the holiday mood. It also reminds me that this is the time to take stock of what has happened during the past year, and to make plans for the coming year.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PAST YEAR
Many of these items were mentioned in my Director's Report, available on the Web as a PowerPoint presentation and will be printed in JAAVSO, vol. 34, no.2.

Probably the biggest change this year was the hiring of a new Director — me! Shortly after Janet's passing in early 2004, the Council initiated a search for a new Director. Several qualified candidates were interviewed, and after a lengthy selection process, I was hired early this year and came on board in March. Elizabeth Waagen should be commended for her capable leadership of the AAVSO during the interim period — it was very easy for me to take over with Elizabeth to turn to whenever a question arose.

We had an astonishing number of observations submitted this year — approaching one million. Many of those are CCD time series, and so how they count in comparison to the individual visual observations is an interesting concept. However the data are taken, it still means a major addition to our International Database. We now have about 13 million observations, and if history repeats itself, should be close to 14 million by this time next year.

At the same time as we received all of these observations, we also handled 2,846 requests for AAVSO data and information from professional astronomers, observers, educators and students. This is 50% more than last year, due to our increased campaign activity, the end of the validation project (and therefore availability of more data online), and the new satellites (such as Spitzer and Swift) with need of ground-based verification. There were numerous other requests not uniquely identified, such as researchers checking Quick Look data, plotting light curves, using the AAVSO charts, etc.

Together with colleagues from Marshall Space Flight Center, Sonoma State University, and New Mexico State University, we held a very successful Third High Energy Astrophysics Workshop for Amateur Astronomers. While invited speakers told us of the latest high-energy news, we also had smaller workshops on CCD photometry. Most of the invited and contributed papers are online at our Web site.

This was a heavy publication year for the AAVSO. Two volumes of the Journal were published: 32.2 and 33.1. More importantly, we started publishing the electronic counterpart: eJAAVSO. This includes both back issues as well as all articles accepted for publication. These new articles are indexed into ADS as soon as they are posted, for rapid publication turnaround. We also published CCD Views 325-338, Eyepiece Views was restarted, Alert Notices 311-326, Four Variable Star of the Season articles, Eclipsing Binary Monographs 9 and 10, a revised Manual for Visual Observing, a Photoelectric Photometry Newsletter as well as the general AAVSO Newsletter, many issues of the Solar Bulletin, and much more. Nearly two dozen refereed papers with staff members as coauthors were published.

The GRB/High Energy Network showed enthusiastic participation. The Swift satellite was launched and is producing excellent localizations (a few arcsec using the X-ray telescope!). Four afterglows were detected and measured by network members. Several of the bursts had bright afterglows: GRBs 051111, 051109, 050922, 050820, 050721, 050525, and 050502 were all brighter than 15th magnitude but only in the first few minutes after the gamma-ray burst (they fade rapidly). In addition, the burst GRB050904 has been identified as the most distant GRB (its redshift was measured as z=6.29), and GRB050709 was the first localized short-hard gamma-ray burst, possibly supporting the neutron-neutron star merger theory. Observations in support of the GLAST Telescope Network continue.

The Chart Team has been very busy this year under the leadership of Team Leader Mike Simonsen and Headquarters Coordinator Aaron Price. Over the past three years, 2,000 charts for more than 400 stars have been created, updating about 40% of all AAVSO Variable Star Charts. The team is currently addressing a few chart errors, but is winding down their chart-making activity. At the same time, the Comparison Star Database Team is nearing their first goal of documenting over 70,600 comparison stars on over 4,100 charts. Once all of the comparison stars are identified and entered into a database, we can obtain improved photometry for many of the stars and revise sequences to make them more useful to the observers.

The Web site has been greatly extended this year. New pages giving staff biographies, a virtual tour of the HQ building, Spring, Fall, HEA meeting special sections, the online book auction, and many feature articles were added. The Internet Relay Chat Server was installed to allow the AAVSO to host real-time chat sessions among its members. CVnet was started to provide concentrated information for our cataclysmic variable observers.

Our campaign activity has ranged from exosolar planets to galaxies. Many campaigns were in support of space missions, such as the AE Aqr campaign for Chris Mauche. AAVSO members monitored several CVs for Paula Szkody, ensuring that they were not in outburst so that HST observations could be made safely.

We were fortunate in having Grant Foster as our first Janet A. Mattei Research Fellow. Grant spent time at HQ this summer, researching a project on secular period evolution of cepheids using the extensive decades-long observation sets in our International Database. Two Magaret Mayall Assistants worked at HQ. Erin Snyder wrote Java interfaces to the new MySQL membership database. Yelena Synkova entered most of the older eclipsing binary and RR Lyr data that had been submitted to HQ on paper.

Many awards have been given out to our members this year. Michael Simonsen was given the Director's award for his many years of vital service to the AAVSO. Martha Hazen was honored for her outstanding service over the decades for the AAVSO with the Merit Award. Janet Mattei was posthumously given the William Tyler Olcott award for her longtime mentoring and promotion of variable star astronomy. Two Special Recognition Awards were given. The first was to Charles Whitney for thirty years of devoted volunteer service as Editor of the JAAVSO and the other to long-time AAVSO member Charles Scovil for his many years of service as Chair of the Telescope and New Charts Committees. Of course, many observers were recognized for their achievement of special levels of observation totals.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
But wait! That's not all! We have many more new things planned for the coming year. The automated chart plotter will be released, enabling real-time generation of charts and making their creation and maintenance much simpler. The International Database will be ported to a true relational database, making outside automated queries much simpler (and again, making internal maintenance vastly simpler). We are building a variable star index search engine, permitting data-mining across multiple surveys. The headquarters building is going to be renovated. More workshops will be given. We are going to travel the Southern Hemisphere to recruit new variable star observers and to cement our ties with our southern colleagues.

All-in-all, I think this has been a momentous year for the Association. I think it bodes well for the future. We have a stable financial situation, excellent staff and volunteers, and an enthusiastic observer base from which to contribute valuable service to the scientific community. Thank you all for your efforts!

—Arne

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