The 105th Annual Meeting of the AAVSO, November 11-12, is shaping up to be one of the most interesting, informative and exciting meetings since the Centennial Celebration in 2011.
The theme is ‘The AAVSO's Role in the Age of Large Surveys’. We have several distinguished invited speakers addressing this topic as well as a panel of experts who will not only give talks of their own, but will answer questions from our members and observers on Saturday afternoon, November 12th.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years and some concerns have been expressed about the impact of stellar surveys on the AAVSO and her observers. With all these professional telescopes and satellites pointing at the sky, will there be any room left for amateur contributions in the future?
Yesterday a review paper appeared on arXiv.org that will be published in the next issue of the Journal of the AAVSO- “Variable stars with the Kepler space telescope”. It examines the results of the Kepler space telescope on sun-like stars, red giants and Miras, Cepheid variables and RR Lyrae stars, main sequence stars, sub-dwarfs and white dwarfs, eclipsing binaries, cataclysmic variables and supernovae. But most interesting to me were the conclusions drawn by the authors of this fantastic review paper. They specifically address the impact of Kepler on the AAVSO and amateur astronomers-
“Perhaps counterintuitively,the largest surveys will not replace the backyard astronomers at all. There is a simple reason for this: the large-aperture telescopes collecting data for Pan-STARRS or LSST are aimed at the billions of faint objects on the sky, but typically saturate in the 12-15 magnitude range, leaving the bright objects unchecked. There are some professional projects that aim to fill this gap, like the Fly’s Eye, Evryscope or MASCARA instruments(P´al et al. 2013; Law et al. 2015; Snellen et al. 2013), but unlike the observing network of the AAVSO, these depend on the funding flow instead of the supply of volunteer observers. The sky is still there to explore and to discover for everybody.”
I highly recommend this paper for everyone interested in the results from the Kepler mission and the future of amateur astronomers and citizen scientists, and if you’d like to learn more, please consider coming to this year's annual meeting.
You can register online at https://www.aavso.org/apps/meetings/Fall2016/
If you can’t attend in person you can also sign up to attend virtually at our online store https://www.aavso.org/aavso-online-store
I hope to see you there!
Mike Simonsen
AAVSO
Mike Simonsen beat me to it! I was going to post about the excellent review article on Variable Stars and the Kepler Mission, by Laszlo Molnar, Robert Szabo and Emese Plachy, just posted in JAAVSO. A few months ago, motivated by a suggestion from AAVSO Director Dr. Stella Kafka, and by our success with review articles in the JAAVSO Centennial Issue, we solicited some review articles on topics suggested by the JAAVSO Editorial Board. The Kepler review is the first to appear. There is another, on studying the evolution of pulsating stars by observing their period changes, by Hilding Neilson, Horace Smith and me, which should be submitted before the end of October. And we hope to have one or two more submitted before the end of the year. We hope you enjoy these. They are an excellent way for you to gain up-to-date, in-depth knowledge about a topic in variable star astronomy, and how your observations have contributed to this.
If you have suggestions about other possible topics for review articles, please let me know, and we will give it every consideration.
John Percy, JAAVSO Editor, john.percy at utoronto.ca