AAVSO Newsletter 32: What's New at HQ

Travel is an important part of any astronomer's job. The AAVSO is an international association with members and observers in more than 40 countries. It is important that AAVSO staff travel and represent the organization at both professional and amateur meetings all over the globe. This can get quite expensive, especially with rising fuel costs. To help fund future travel the AAVSO has started the Flying Star Program.

You can become an AAVSO Flying Star by:

Donating $350 or Purchasing a ticket for an AAVSO Staff Member with your Frequent Flyer Miles.

In return you'll get:

A letter from the Director, describing the donation, for your tax records.
A full report of meeting activities and results personally sent to you by the staff member who travelled on your donation.
Your name listed in the acknowledgements section in any poster, talk or paper presented at the meeting and/or published.
Your name listed as a "Flying Star" on the AAVSO web site and home page.

Remember, all donations are tax deductable in the USA. Your donation will only be used for air, train or bus fare and not for any other expense. Our goal for 2005/6 is $1400 or 4 tickets and we're well on our way to acheiving that goal! Please consider joing the Flying Star Program today. Checkout the AAVSO website at:

http://www.aavso.org/aavso/support/flyingstar.php

Observing Manual Updates

New Translations Underway

As you may already know, the AAVSO has members and active observers in over 40 countries world-wide. In an effort to make The AAVSO Manual for Visual Observing of Variable Stars more useful we have currently launched a project to translate the manual into four languages; Spanish, French, Russian, and Turkish. Thanks to the assistance of several ambitious AAVSO volunteers in various countries the project is well on its way. We intend to make these translated versions, complete with all the photographs and figures from the English language version, available on our website for online viewing, downloading, and printing. Watch for them in the coming year!

Where Are You?

Show us!

Help us create a map of AAVSO'ers! Frappr (friend mapper) is a new application that uses Google maps to plot the locations of a group around the world. Add your name so we can see where all our AAVSO'ers are located. You can also post your picture and a brief message. Visit: http://www.frappr.com/aavso

Calendar Year

A Generous Donation

Our thanks go out to long-time member and benefactor Tom Williams who graciously donated funds to include an AAVSO sponsored page in the 2006 American Astronomical Society Membership Calendar. Tom also provided the funds to purchase a calendar for every current AAVSO member who is not a member of AAS. This year, the AAVSO sponsored the month of November and our page features the story of our involvment with the nova V838 Mon. The calendars were sent out in early December. Thanks to Tom, we will have a sponsored page in the calendar every year leading up to our Centennial in 2011!

Announcing the First Janet A. Mattei Research Fellow

Arne Henden with Grant Foster in front of AAVSO Headquarters

Established in 2004 in honor of the late Janet A. Mattei, Director of the AAVSO, the purpose of the Janet A. Mattei Research Fellowship Program is to fund a scientist, postdoctoral researcher, or student to visit and perform research at AAVSO HQ using the AAVSO International Database and publish the results.

We are pleased to announce that the first Janet A. Mattei Research Fellow was Grant Foster. Grant is well-known to many of the AAVSO membership as a past staff member at headquarters. Some may recognize Grant, a talented guitarist and singer, from his performance at the Janet A. Mattei Memorial Service back in November of 2004. Grant is also the author of many of our data analysis programs such as TS, and for developing the CLEANEST algorithm and weighted wavelet Z-transform (WWZ).

While at HQ Grant worked with Director Arne Henden on the cepheid database, both looking at long-term secular period changes and studying TU Cas in detail. A paper has been written and will be submitted soon to a major journal. Once it has been approved for publication we will link to it on our home page.He also worked with Aaron Price on studying SS Cyg supercycle properties and using WWZ to characterize quasiperiodic oscillations in BZ UMa outbursts. Papers are forthcoming.

We were extremely pleased to have had Grant at HQ this summer and hope this will be the first of many highly successful collaborations with future Mattei Fellows!

[To donate to the Janet A. Mattei Fellowship program contact Headquarters or simply visit our website at: http://www.aavso.org/aavso/support/janetfund.php]