Important News

Members from the MIRA Fourier coefficient team held an online chat session to discuss what needed to be done for the upcoming JAAVSO publication as well as some useful features to be implemented in VStar.  The chat transcript is attached to this post.  

The group established a timeline:
2011-xx-xx: Generate a list of ~400 MIRAs (completed)
2011-xx-xx: Pre-process these MIRAs to remove discrepant data points between JD 2440000 - 24550000 (deadline needs to be set)
2011-09-23 (or before): Brian provides the team with 10-20 sample MIRAs with known properties (periods, changes in periods, etc.) for testing/training.
2011-10-15: Have analysis of the sample MIRA data complete and report back to the team.
2011-11-15: Abstract and extended outline complete.
2012-01-15: First rough draft of JAAVSO publication complete
2012-03-01: JAAVSO publication submitted.

More details and an updated timeline can be found on the team timetable page (team membership may be required to view this page).

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The AAVSO & Citizen Sky have formally issued a Call for Papers for articles about epsilon Aurigae, similar stars and techniques for bright star observations. This will be the capstone for the Citizen Sky project and much help is available for those new to scholarly publication. Read more

On behalf of my coauthors I am pleased to announce that Tom Pearson, Brian Kloppenborg, and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein will have an article in tomorrow's release of The Classroom Astronomer, an education magazine for secondary and undergraduate education.  There is a sampler for the next issue that includes a one-page excerpt from our articleRead more

I have recently been contacted by the editor for a magazine entitled "The Classroom Astronomer" about writing an article discussing how DSLR cameras can be used in the classroom.  The magazine is geared towards secondary and undergraduate teachers who have an interest in astronomy.  The article is suppose to answer two primary questions:

1. What you can do with a DSLR Camera
2. Why you should use it in the classroom

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Greetings from the 2011 AAS Meeting being held in Seattle, WA.  

Today Rebecca and I presented two posters on behalf of the Citizen Sky project.  Rebecca's poster was focused on the project as a whole, whereas my poster discussed the work the DSLR Documentation and Reduction Team has created for the CS website.

I have posted a copy of the DSLR poster to my portfolio page:
https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/port.detail?id=176986 There were several people who were interested in using DSLR as photometers and thanks to conversation I think the team has some more work to do which will make a very cool, publishable paper.Read more

An updated version of the multi-platform, easy-to-use variable star data visualization and analysis tool, VStar, is now available! (To download the new version simply visit the VStar page and click on "Download VStar Now.")

Check out the recent posts by David Benn and Doc Kinne on the VStar Team page for more details on the new release.

If you are unfamiliar with VStar please visit the VStar page for a basic introduction.  There you can find out how to download, launch, and use this powerful tool.  Happy VStaring!!Read more

We will be hosting a chat this Friday, April 9 starting at 16 UT (Noon Eastern, 11:00 AM Central, 10:00 AM Mountain, and 9:00 AM Pacific).  This chat is a little different than our previous chats because we have partnered up with Astronomers Without Borders and their Global Astronomy Month project.

This chat will be much like our other "Beginners' Chats" in the past in that the goal will be to answer questions about Citizen Sky, Astronomers without Borders, epsilon Aurigae, and/or astronomy in general. The tone will be tailored to new participants in the project so this is a great chance to find out more about the project without feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the project. Also, Rebecca Turner, the project manager, will be on hand to answer general questions about Citizen Sky.Read more

This weeks' big announcement can now be made, the paper that Dr. Stencel alluded to
is now published (in the April 8 issue of Nature).  If you subscribe to Nature, you can access the article here.  For those of you who do not have a subscription to Nature, I'll post up the article as submitted to a website and include the link later this week.  Until then, say hello to the disk:Read more

A  new, open-source data visualization and analysis tool called VStar is now ready for download.  It is the product of a Citizen Sky programming team led by David Benn - VStar Software Development Team.  We are very proud of VStar and thank the team for the many, many hours of hard work that have gone into creating this tool.

A brief description, some simple instructions, and a download link are available on the VStar page. Read more

I decided to postpone my discussion of IRTF for one more day to announce something even cooler!  The DSLR Documentation and Reduction team has released their first set of tutorials for general use. These tutorials walk you through how you can use your DSLR camera (or any other camera that can take RAW files) to do high-precision photometry, acheiving results of 0.01 or 0.001 mag precision!Read more