March 2010 Contest: Win a Year's Access to Robotic Telescopes

The AAVSO Robotic Telescope Network (AAVSONet) is a collection of five telescopes, all located in the Southwest United States. A sixth telescope will go online this year in New Zealand, allowing access to the beautiful southern hemisphere skies.

All of these telescopes are scientific grade with various photometric filter sets. Time on the telescopes is shared between AAVSO key projects (primarily surveys and field calibrations) and observing programs run by AAVSO members. The winner of this contest will receive a year's access to the telescope at the same level as that enjoyed by AAVSO members.

We will hold a drawing to determine the winner of the contest. You will be given an entry into the drawing for each observation you make of a star in the 10 Star Tutorial in the month of March. The observation must be uploaded through the Citizen Sky Data Submission Tools and there is a maximum of one entry per star per week. (In other words, you can't make an observation of epsilon Aurigae every night for all of March! Well, you can but it only counts as four entries [one per week]).

The winner of the contest will get access to submit observing proposals to the telescopes' Time Allocation Committee, just like a regular AAVSO member. After the proposal is approved, scheduled and the data acquired - it will be given to you in the form of FITS images that have already been dark and flat field calibrated. They can be used for scientific photometry or to make beautiful images. The image below was taken with an AAVSONet telescope.

The winner will be announced the first week in April. Good observing!

Throughout the month, I'll post leaderboards to this thread showing the number of observations and by whom.