Joint AAVSO+AAS meeting in Boston, May 22-26, 2011

More than one thousand professional astronomers will be meeting in Boston to compare notes on a wide variety of astronomy and astrophysics at the spring meeting of the American Astronomical Society, jointly held with AAVSO.  On the varied agenda will be 4 posters and at least 2 talks about the status of epsilon Aurigae eclipse studies and Citizen Sky support of these activities.  I plan to summarize what the campaign effort has meant for professionals and amateurs, as well as report on the discovery of high temperature helium absorption in infrared spectra during mid-eclipse.  Naomi Pequette has applied powerful disk modelling software to epsilon Aur data and concludes that a fair amount of accretion must be occuring.  Brian Kloppenborg will report on progress toward improving the orbital solution for epsilon Aurigae, by combining astrometric, spectroscopic and interferometric data.  Brian will also be reporting on how Citizen Sky teamwork has fared, and Aaron Price will be presenting work on high speed photometry of epsilon Aurigae.  For a look at the abstracts and the rest of the program, start at page: http://www.abstractsonline.com/plan/AdvancedSearch.aspx .  Watch this space for a report on what transpires.  Also, though epsilon Aurigae is nearing solar conjunction in early June, keep those observing reports coming - we're not quite out of eclipse yet!