Vision/Mission

AAVSO Vision

The AAVSO seeks to be the world-recognized leader in information and data on variable stars.

The AAVSO's Mission

The AAVSO is an international non-profit organization of variable star observers whose mission is:

• to observe and analyze variable stars
• to collect and archive observations for worldwide access
• to forge strong collaborations between amateur and professional astronomers
• to promote scientific research and education using variable star data.

The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) is a non-profit worldwide scientific and educational organization of amateur and professional astronomers who are interested in stars that change in brightness—variable stars.

The AAVSO was founded in 1911 to coordinate variable star observations—made largely by amateur astronomers—for Harvard College Observatory. The AAVSO was incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1918 as a non-profit scientific and educational organization. Today, as an independent, private research organization headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with active participants in 108 countries, and an archive of over 21 million variable star observations, it is the world’s largest association of variable star observers.

Membership in the AAVSO is open to anyone—professionals, amateurs, and educators alike—interested in variable stars and in contributing to the support of valuable research.

Professional astronomers have neither the time nor the telescopes needed to gather data on the brightness changes of thousands of variables, and amateurs make a real and useful contribution to science by observing variable stars and submitting their observations to the AAVSO International Database.