Recognition

One of the "knitting jobs" (as Dorrit Hoffleit used to call "spare time" tasks) I have taken on is to update and upgrade the page of meeting group photos. I'm rescanning some of the photos for better quality, adding missing items, and adding identification keys wherever possible. Some of the 1920s photos were published with keys in Popular Astronomy, and many of the photos made in the 1980s and 1990s were routinely distributed with keys, but many other years need closer attention, and I will be adding these from time to time, as time allows.

It is always interesting and fascinating to put faces to names and names to faces of the AAVSO's members; and there are even some interesting non-AAVSO people in the meeting photos (Ejnar Hertzsprung, for example--see if you can spot him).

It is also fascinating to see who were the top observers of the day attending meetings; and who attended meetings regularly, but were not necessarily prolific observers, or observers at all; and who were "surprise attendees" who were known entities, but who were rarely seen (Leslie Peltier, for example). Looking at the early photos along with the corresponding meeting report published in Variable Comments makes for an interesting study in character(s).

This knitting-job inspires a much-needed supplement to the lists of top observers published in Advancing Variable Star Astronomy. Those published lists covered the AAVSO's entire 100-year span, but they do not do justice to the early observers--so many of the names truly worthy of recognition are missing.

So, here follows a listing of the top observers (> 10,000 observations) of the AAVSO's first fifty years (< November 1961). Some observers listed below continued observing after the first 50 years of the AAVSO so their lifetime totals are higher than the numbers shown here. (The totals given are from the time of archival data entry, and may have since been slightly adjusted for errors, duplicates, omissions, etc.). Click on the observer's name to see a photo.