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Jennifer Borland, and evaluation and education research expert, is working on a short term project regarding our online forums. If you are interested in participating in qualitative data analysis over the next few weeks, check out her post!

This week we updated the Spanish translation of our 10-Star Visual Observing Tutorial for southern hemisphere observers. We'd like to also remind new members of the 10-Star Tutorial - a great training tool for those with no background in variable star observation.

We also have a 5-Star tutorial for time series data analysis that uses our free VStar software. If anyone is interested in dipping their toes into the analysis waters, it's a great place to start.

The 10-Star Visual Observing Tutorials are linked from here.

The 5-Star Data Analysis tutorial is linked from here.

Thanks to Joan, Sebastian and the Southern Gems team for much of the translation work!

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The Southern Gems team does it again. This time they have published a Spanish translation of the southern hemisphere 10-Star Tutorial. Read more

Today I had the opportunity to talk with a group of high school students in an astronomy class at University Schools, a charter school, up the road in Greely, CO. The last time I was around high school students was when I did some classroom observing as part of the education program at my undergraduate institution, Hastings College. The group came to DU's historic Chamberlin observatory as part of an outing to Denver.

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David Benn and the VStar team also continue to do great work. They have just released version 2.12 of VStar. A download link is here. Background info on VStar is here. Also, don't forget the plugin library which has some neat toys in it!

The Southern Gems team is at it again. This time they have released a Portugese translation of their  11-Star Tutorial for the Southern Hemisphere. Thanks to  Jonatas Ramos and Marcelo Souza, who did the translation. And also to team leader Joan for continuing their great work.

Download the tutorial by clicking here.Read more

We will be hosting a Citizen Sky online chat this Tuesday at 4pm eastern (+5UT). Dr. Bob, Brian, Rebecca, Aaron and other Citizen Sky and AAVSO staff will be on hand. Topics will include updates on epsilon Aurigae, the upcoming AAS meeting, and ideas for research teams. However, it will be a free chat so any Citizen Sky/VSO topic is welcomed. Hope to see you there!

Note: The chat transcript can now be downloaded from below.

Login here with a web browser:
http://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/irc.cgi

(Note: The next chat will be scheduled for the first week in February...)Read more

The awesome Southern Gems team has published their first product: a version of the 10-Star Tutorial for the southern hemisphere. It's a great example of complementary team work.Read more

I would like to announce that the DSLR Documentation and Reduction Team has released the long-awaited Air Mass correcting spreadsheet in the Intermediate-level Final Reduction tutorial.  If you have been doing DSLR work in the last few months and your target star has been more than 30 degrees from the zenith, we highly suggest you re-reduce your data with this spreadsheet.

There are sure to be a few bugs we didn't get worked out in the tutorial and/or spreadsheet so if you find something please let us know.  If you have any questions/comments, please post them in the photometry forums.

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