AAVSO Observer Stories

     April is the month of citizen science, astronomers, and volunteers!

AAVSO's volunteer observers are world wide, and are crucial to AAVSO's database and scientific research by professional astronomers! 

 We will introduce a different observer every few days throughout the month! 

We reached out to our international observers to learn more about their personal astronomy stories, including how they got started with astronomy or the AAVSO, overcoming challenges to get to where they are in the scientific world, and how their AAVSO data contributed to particular research. We hope their stories inspire you to achieve your astronomy aspirations or get started

If you are an AAVSO observer who has not submitted your story, and you would like to be highlighted, please submit it to aavso@aavso.org. 

The initials next to each name is the unique AAVSO observer code (obscode) assigned to each person.

His visual observations of his most observed star, TV CRV:

 

 

 

Anyone can access and plot star observations using AAVSO's Light Curve Generator

 

His story:

I have been a member of the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada since May of 1964. One of the programs our director of observations had encouraged us to do was follow the behavior of certain bright variable stars, like g and X Herculis and RR Coronae Borealis. I did feel a bit guilty that I was observing and submitting reports to AAVSO without actually being a member, and so later I purchased an annual membership. (Depending on finances, my membership has bounced along from annual to sustaining and back.) Over the next few years, I gradually added more stars to my list. Then in January of 1973, I ordered several dozen charts of various stars.

On August 30, 1975, I made an independent discovery of V1500 Cygni, the bright nova of that summer, and three years later, made a second independent discovery of V6668 Cygni, the nova from that year. In 1979, I relocated to Arizona to pursue my major astronomy project, my search for comets. For a long while, my numbers of variable star observations plummeted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While working on my biography of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, I learned that he had discovered what he thought was a nova in Corvus. I learned where the star was in Corvus, and from a search through the plate stacks at Harvard College Observatory, in 1989, I found nine later outbursts. Rather than a nova, it appears that Tombaugh had discovered a high galactic latitude cataclysmic variable star. I began a nightly program of checking the area. On March 22, I was able to check on the area using a telescope in Florida. Home the next night, March 23, 1990, 59 years to the day after Tombaugh first recorded the star on a photographic plate, I checked the area again with my own telescope and suddenly found the star, in outburst at just fainter than 12th magnitude. The star was eventually named TV Corvi but I have always referred to it as “Tombaugh’s star” in honor of the person who first saw it. It is my favorite variable star.

In the many years since, I began my life in Arizona, and I have concentrated more on comet hunting than on observing variable stars. However, the first of several observer guides I have written was on variable stars. And I still attempt nightly checks of Tombaugh’s star whenever its field is above the horizon. I also follow Alpha Orionis and T Coronae Borealis. I have very much enjoyed my long and happy membership in the AAVSO.

With all best wishes,

David Levy

 

Keep scrolling to see more observer stories!