Thanks to a fantastic volunteer effort by Cliff Kotnik and David Benn, we now have a plugin availble for VStar which can be used to view and plot data on variable stars directly from the Gaia website (DR 2).
October 11, 2018: Dr. Koji Mukai (NASA-Greenbelt Space Flight Center) has requested AAVSO assistance in monitoring several nova-like variables in support of upcoming Chandra observations. The first target, KQ Mon, is scheduled to be observed with Chandra during the week of 2018 October 15-22.
AAVSO Newsletter Number 78 (October 2018) has been published and is online. AAVSO members may download a high- or low-resolution version from here. This issue will be available to non-members when the next issue (Number 79, January 2019) is published.
The non-profit American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) has begun a search for a volunteer Editor-in-chief for its research publication Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (JAAVSO). The JAAVSO is an electronic publication, which content is acknowledged in the Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
The AAVSO Sequence Team has been working hard over the past year updating and improving charts and comparison star sequences. The following is a list of updates made since June 2017. If you observe any of these objects please update your charts and photometry tables with the most recent version as soon as possible. This list is also available for download in CSV, XLSX, and PDF versions (see the links at the bottom of this page).
September 27, 2018: Dr. Ed Sion (Villanova University) requests AAVSO observers' assistance in monitoring the recurrent nova T Pyx, beginning immediately, in support of upcoming HST observations.
The HST COS observations have been scheduled to take place during the window of 2018 October 4 - 6. It is essential to know the status of T Pyx in order for the HST team to safeguard the instrumentation and make a final decision about approving the COS observations.
This month's Long Period Variable (LPV) star, S Aur, should be a treat for Visual observers. S Aur is a fairly bright but very dark red Carbon star. It’s B-V index is between ~3.5 to ~5, making it a very red object. (The B-V ratio seems to change over time, which might be investigated in the future with a focus on the B, V, and Ic bands.)
