Speakers Bureau

Another interesting outreach initiative from the AAVSO is the Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau is a service established for people and groups looking for enthusiastic, knowledgeable speakers to provide informative presentations for astronomy clubs, star parties, banquets, Scout Troops, Astronomy Day activities and other public and private astronomy functions.

You can see a list of the available speakers, along with the list of topics they can cover here. This is only a list of topics the speakers have spoken to in the past. If you're looking for something specific, just ask. We can probably accommodate you.

Most speakers are willing to travel a reasonable distance, generally two hours drive from home, free of charge. Reimbursement for speaking engagements requiring more miles and time can be negotiated on an individual basis with the speakers themselves. The speakers' home town and distance they will travel are included on the web page.

To request a speaker for your astronomical function simply send an email to aavso at aavso dot org with 'Speakers Bureau' in the title. We will put you in touch with the individual you request or suggest one for you.

Some of the speakers from the bureau and I will be giving talks at this years Astronomical League Convention (ALCon 2009) in New York, NY this August. If you are going to attend, look me up. I'm always glad to get to know fellow astronomers.


If you are unable to get a speaker for your event due to time, money or geographical challenges, AAVSO also offers a library of ready-made PowerPoint presentations you can use to give a talk yourself. These are available free for download from the AAVSO Education and Outreach Pages.

Feast or Famine

I've complained enough about the worst winter ever for observing here at the C. E. Scovil Observatory, so I won't add to the litany of complaints.

But there is plenty of good news to report as winter seems to be loosening its grip on Michigan.
1- The weather has been good lately. It's still cold, but at least the clouds have found someone in Nebraska or Minnesota to bother. They've thinned out here.
2- I finished insulating and paneling the roll-off shed control room. It's actually almost too warm in there at night. I was in shirt sleeves tonight, and sweating a bit around the neck. Outside temperature, -2.3C.
3- Because of the crappy weather I had a lot more time to devote to fantasy football this season, resulting in my winning the championship in two out of three leagues I played in.

Not only did I get the satisfaction of finally beating my son in the playoffs (he has owned me for five years!), I won enough money to by a new CCD autoguider and 80mm guidescope to improve my photometry results. I also bought a new awesome treadmill for the living room. Irene and I can share the miles and smiles while watching all our favorites on DVR.
4- Even though my 12" GPS still can't point worth a damn, its now taking great data once I get it parked on a variable star.
5- The new photometry software, also compliments of fantasy football, is worth every nickel and making life much more enjoyable for me.
6- Not only is my own observatory ramping up the amount of data collected each week, but my request for remote observations from the Sonoita Research Observatory was granted, and now I am getting data 3-4 times a week on my target stars from Arizona.

So we have gone from no observations for November- January to working every free minute to keep up with the glut of data coming in and reporting activity and outbursts of CVs in my program in a timely manner to CVnet and AAVSO.

Like many things in life, sometimes it's feast or famine. This month it's feast.

SimoCowboy Ready to Roll!

Next week is a conference I have been excited about attending for a long time. It's an entire week devoted to my specialty, cataclysmic variables. The list of attendees is a literal who's who of CV research.

The conference is called Wild Stars in the Old West II. This special get together doesn't come around that often. I wouldn't miss it for the world.


From the website:

"It has been ten years since the last North American Workshop on Cataclysmic Variables and nearly five years since the last international meeting on cataclysmic variables and their kin. Of particular interest since these last meetings are new results based on observational platforms such as GALEX, Spitzer, Chandra, XMM INTEGRAL and Swift/BAT, large surveys such as SDSS and planned Pan-STARRS and LSST, smaller but equally important surveys such as All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS), Catalina Sky Survey, �Pi of the Sky�, ROTSE, results from large aperture ground-based telescopes, theoretical advances, and evolutionary relationships of CVs to other binary stars."

I plan to blog about the proceedings and talks, and I'm taking a digital audio recorder to do some one on one interviews with some of the leaders in CV research. These will be turned into podcasts for Slacker Astronomy and Restless Universe.

Sunday is a travel day, and the welcome get together in Tucson. Monday, the real stuff begins. Check back for updates next week.

Yeehaw!

Astronomy and Fantasy Football?

I love NFL football. It's the only sport I follow anymore. I used to love baseball, but when they canceled the world series while on strike, I gave up on baseball. I mean really, they didn't even cancel the World Series for World War II, but they canceled it over money? Screw baseball.

So NFL football is the only pastime, hobby, diversion I have to take me away from astronomy 24/7. I need a distraction for my sanity, so I won't apologize for my obsession with football.

A few years ago, my son asked me to join a fantasy football league he was in with co-workers. I'd never played before, and wasn't sure what it was all about, but quickly realized that this was made for me and my OCD personality. Essentially, you draft your own team from the player pool of the NFL and then play games each week in head to head competition based on the statistical performance of the players on your team in games played each week. You can trade players with other owners and pick up players off the waiver wire, just like in the NFL.

It was the best $150.00 I ever spent. My son and I played each other in the Super Bowl that first year, and he won. We've been playing against each other ever since, and we've spent hours and hours debating football, life, and a million other things we probably wouldn't have taken the time to discuss if we didn't share this fantasy football obsession.

In September this year, we went to a Browns/Vikings game in Cleveland to see Brett Favre one more time before he retires. It was a glorious road trip. We drove to Cleveland the night before the game, had a great dinner and debated football and life over drinks to the wee hours. Then we drove to the game in the morning and enjoyed one of the most perfect, sunny, crisp days football was ever played under in a terrific stadium with rabid fans. It was a ball. Our plan is to visit all the NFL stadiums in the next decade or so. Sooner or later we'll be dragging my grandson along for an education in football fanaticism.

Through the years, my son has beaten me consistently in our head to head fantasy competitions. He has won two league championships, while until last year, I rarely even made the playoffs. Last year, I snuck into the playoffs as the last seed and went all the way from 6th spot to league champion. In the process, I had to beat my son, Jan, which made it all that much more special.

I also won the championship in another league I played in; so I won two out of the three leagues I played in last year. The prize money totaled over $2000.00! Did I mention we have this huge, gaudy trophy that holds about 30 ounces of beer for the Champ to keep on his mantle for the whole next season?

Like any good astronomy freak, I spent my winnings buying astronomical equipment. I bought a CCD auto-guider, mounting rings and an 80mm guide scope. I also purchased a treadmill which we have in the living room, in front of the plasma TV.

Fast forward to the present. This is the first week of playoffs and you guessed it, I am playing my son in the first round in the league we play in together. Bragging rights at Christmas dinner and $600 are at stake so this is serious business! I'm also leading the pack in another league I play in, so I'm looking at finishing in the money in 2 out of 4 leagues this year.

The AAVSO meeting in April will be held in Argentina this year. If I win both leagues, I might actually be able to afford to fly Irene and myself there. If my teams sputter in the playoffs, it's doubtful we will spend the money, in spite of it being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Funny how even my distraction of fantasy football has turned into an astronomy related activity; and one with such important ramifications. It's really not that hard to understand. I'm spoiled. I love what I do, I'm passionate about it, no matter what it is I'm doing, and I would be totally bored if it were any other way.

We want to go to the southern hemisphere and see the sky down under.

Go Runnamuckers...
Go Belichick's Hoodie!

Not enough hours in the week

I could have worse problems than being too busy. So I'm not complaining about the way things have been going lately. I'm working on some really exciting projects for the AAVSO, my research is starting to show results and I've got some traveling to do which started last week and continues into June. Unfortunately, when  it gets this crazy the first thing that suffers is usually my blog. I'm sorry if you've already read the Ophiuchus piece and you keep coming here expecting to find some new Simostuff. So, as a way of explaining that it's not me being lazy, let me tell you what I've been up to.

The first, and biggest thing on my plate is writing a proposal for a project which will be the first of its kind ever, and is such a cool idea I wish I'd thought of it- a decadal survey of amateur astronomy and astrophysics. So, what is a decadal survey you ask?

Every ten years, professional astronomers and scientists engage in a two year process to determine what the current state of our knowledge of the universe is, the pressing science questions for the coming decade, and how we should invest billions of tax-payer dollars on satellites, telescopes and other experiments in order to learn the answers to these questions. At the end of the process a summary report, published by the National Academy of Sciences is issued, prioritizing what programs and major initiatives the astronomical community believes show the most promise for advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and offer the maximum scientific return on investment.

This report, the Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, forms the basis for funding decisions made in the following years by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. The recommendations of this report have resulted in the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer Space Telescopes, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and its follow on experiment the Planck Surveyor, the Kepler Mission to find earthlike extra-solar planets, the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) and the recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

We believe it is time to examine the role amateur astronomers, in collaboration with the professional community, can play in the advancement of human knowledge in the coming decade, and propose to undertake a similar initiative, the first of its kind- The International Decadal Survey of Amateur Astronomy and Astrophysics. The goal of this decadal survey will be to carry out an assessment of professional-amateur collaborations in astronomy and astrophysics, and to prepare a concise report, recommending specific projects and areas of scientifically fruitful pro-am collaborations and studies, addressed to professional and amateur astronomical organizations, agencies supporting the field, the governmental committees with jurisdiction over those agencies, the general scientific community, and the public at large.

As project manager, this will probably take up about 20-25% of my time for the next two years, but I think it is so exciting I'm actually looking forward to it. Besides writing a proposal to fund this project, I've been busy writing and talking to people to get letters of support and to gauge their interest and potential to participate in the survey. I've built a website to explain how it will be organized and the time table it will proceed on. You can see it here. Things are progressing nicely, but it is a lot of work.

The Society for Astronomical Sciences (SAS) will be holding their annual symposium in May and I am giving a talk on my Z Cam research, co-authoring on a paper about the decadal survey, and I'm presenting a poster on Photometrica and AAVSOnet.

So, first the research. Z Camelopardalis-type stars (Z Cams or UGZ) are dwarf novae that show cyclic outbursts, but sometimes after an outburst they do not return to their quiescent magnitude. Instead they appear to get stuck, for months or even years, at a brightness of about one magnitude fainter than outburst maximum. These episodes are known as standstills. Z Cam cycle times characteristically range from 10 to 40 days, and their outburst amplitudes are from 2 to 5 magnitudes in V, but standstills are the defining characteristic of the Z Cam stars. Only Z Cams show standstills, so if it doesn't have standstills it isn't a Z Cam.

Above is the light curve for AH Herculis. You can see the up and down light curve where it goes into outburst (gets bright) and then fades back down to 14th magnitude, only to start up again several days later. You can also see the standstill it has been in since last summer on the right. It is stuck around 12.5 mag. It doesn't get bright and it doesn't fade. Standstill.

There are about 50 or so stars that have at one time or another been classified as Z Cam dwarf novae. I argue that the actual number of Z Cams is far less; maybe a dozen or twenty. If I'm right, Z Cams are a rare and interesting type of variable star that has been largely ignored by astronomers up to now. I am coordinating a campaign through the AAVSO CV Section called the Z CamPaign. We've been collecting data on these stars for about 200 days, and I've been examining the light curves of all the known or suspected Z Cams in the AAVSO database, and we've already concluded that several stars long thought to be Z Cams are not, discovered a new phenomena that no one has seen before in two Z Cam stars, and discovered a completely new member of the class. The first paper is written and we're off and running.

Getting Photometrica launched as an online tool for AAVSO members to perform photometry on their CCD images was another project that has recently come to pass. Photometrica is software that exists in a cloud environment. AAVSO doesn't need to buy servers, the software and data storage are hosted by Amazon in their computing cloud. If we need more server capacity, we just pay for more. No maintenance, no hardware, nothing- it just is. So now a member of the AAVSO doesn't need a telescope, CCD, expensive software, or gobs of hard disk storage for images. You can collect data with first class telescopes, the images are automatically uploaded to Photometrica, you log into your account through AAVSO, perform your photometry on the images, generate a report, upload it to the AAVSO database and all you need is internet access. You could literally do this from your IPhone. It's a new world people. One of the dreams is to make this so cheap we can literally give away time and access to developing countries to tech their kids math, science and astronomy.

Speaking of outreach, that leads to my other 'next big thing' on the agenda. I am giving a workshop on variable stars and observing at the North East Astronomy Forum (NEAF) Sunday, April 18, 2010. I am still developing the workshop and working on the presentation. As part of this trip I also had to develop a self-cycling PowerPoint that we can display at our table at NEAF, running from a netbook, projected onto a screen about four feet away in bright lighting. That was a bit of a challenge, but its done. Irene and I leave Friday.

So along with all the regular stuff I have to do every week, there has been a whole new pile of exciting and interesting projects to keep me away from the blog temporarily. But I promise to be back soon. There is no shortage of ideas for articles here either! At last count there were about twenty articles in the drafts folder; mostly pieces I haven't had time to finish because other things took priority. There just aren't enough hours in the week to do it all. But like I said, I could have worse problems.

My Social Network Will

I make no apologies for being involved with social networking through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. I use them every day to network with co-workers, colleagues, associates, friends, family and to meet new people or get introduced to new people.

The good sites work more or less as expected. All of them have their technical glitches, but occasionally something weird or inappropriate happens just because the wheels of the machine keep turning no matter what. It happened to me recently, and it's made me consider what should be done with all my online web pages, social sites, etc. when I'm gone.

LinkedIn kept suggesting I should contact a well-known, highly respected astronomer. Normally I'd take their suggestion and make the effort to reach out, but in this case the person happens to be someone who died suddenly a little over a month ago. It was kinda creepy having the software automatically include him in lists of people I should make a connection with repeatedly. So I decided to do something about it.

Contacting a real person at Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn is a challenge to say the least, and finding out the process for deactivating a deceased person's account is a real exercise in drilling down into the website. Eventually I was able to fill out a form and someone from customer service emailed me a day later with yet another link to another form that I had to fill out and submit to yet another url address.

Did I mention I'm not related to this departed soul. We weren't friends. I don't know anyone in his family. I just thought it ought to be taken care of out of respect for the person.

Well the issue was finally resolved and they deactivated his account, but like I said earlier, it got me to thinking about what my wishes are for all the places my face, facts and opinions are plastered all over the Internet.

This is how I feel about it today. ( I could change my mind...)

Any career oriented pages or accounts, like LinkedIn or professional associations, should be taken down as soon as possible. If I'm a valued member of some organization and they want to put up an "In Memorium" page or something, fine. (Hey, it could happen!) Try to pick a good picture of me to be remembered by, please.

Facebook and similar pages should be deactivated very soon also. I think its morbid to have Facebook suggest to people that they friend a dead person, so please make my Facebook go away after I'm gone if it's still here by then.

The websites I have online are mostly astronomy related and serve a purpose for an active group of astronomers or researchers. Most of them are shared with at least one other person who can decide whether or not to continue them after I am gone. Maybe they'll all be gone before I am. Who knows.

Considering its minutely small footprint on the memory of Google, and the fact that it is a labor of love written for you as much as for me; leave the blog up forever. Maybe some cyber archeologist will find it one day and get a smile out of "The Summer We Flew to the Moon" or "Don't Lick the Telescope". That thought makes me smile.

Early to Bed, Early to Rise

During the summer, astronomical darkness comes so late that if I think it might be clear that night, I go to bed shortly after dinner and wake up around 11PM or midnight to go out and observe. Sometimes the weather prediction is wrong and I wake up to cloudy skies. Sometimes I can go back to bed, especially if I've had several late nights at the telescope, and sometimes I stay up and catch up on emails or shows I've recorded on DVR. I keep checking, and if my luck is good the sky clears up and I can go out before dawn for a while.

Eventually the short nights of sleep accumulate and catch up to me, and I crash in front of the TV around 9PM and stagger up to bed whenever a cat jumps on my head, chest or otherwise wakes me up.

Last night was one of those crash in front of the TV nights. I made my way upstairs around midnight and slept like a stone, until about 4AM. I woke up and looked out the window to the east to see if the clouds had thinned. I could make out a few bright stars through the mist, but it wasn't clear, so I dozed a little more. Around 5AM I woke up again and stared out the window into the darkness of pre-dawn.

It was glorious. A faint sliver of the waning Moon was above the horizon, up and to the right was Venus blazing bright. Mars sat in the no-man's land between Gemini and Taurus' bright stars. It was one of those times where you could draw a line through the Moon and planets to explain to a visitor how the ecliptic is the plane of the solar system on the sky.

I looked for Auriga, and epsilon Aurigae was almost past the top of my window view. I could make out the Pleiades and that lower branch of Perseus that seems to flow right into them. But what surprised me, as it always does each year, was the fact that almost half of Orion's body was above the horizon already! It looked like a November-December evening!

The ancients used to mark the rise of Sirius with some importance, but to me, seeing Orion again after a long spring and summer without him marks the change of seasons. Soon the weather will get cooler at night, the nights will get drier, the seeing will improve and the best part of the observing year will be here- Autumn! Man, I love fall. The color of the leaves, the cool air, football and great nights at the telescope.

Eventually, as the nights get longer and longer, and the Sun rides lower and lower across the sky, winter will set in. I hope its not as bad as last winter. I'm still getting over the shock of having zero clear nights from the end of October last year until March. And the snow piled higher than I can remember since I was a kid.

Whatever we're in store for, it's coming soon. Orion told me so this morning.


Sky map credit: Sky and Telescope and check out this great article

Orion picture credit: http://www.freewebs.com/worldstarsofpeace/worldstarsofpeaceflag.htm

A Busy Week at the Office Today

Just like the old saying, "when it rains, it pours" sometimes the sky opens up and deluges us in other ways. Today was one of those interesting mornings gone mad, turning into a weeks' worth of things to deal with in a single day. Here are the highlights.

7:30AM- Slept in a little after two very long nights at the telescope. Staggered into the kitchen to make coffee, booted up computers in office.

8:00AM- Open up email. 102 messages since yesterday. Doesn't anyone take Sunday off anymore?

8:15- With coffee in hand, plow through observation reports for new outbursts of cataclysmic variables to update the AAVSO CV Section website.

8:20- Discover a report of an unusual/rare outburst of NSV 5285. NSV 5285 does not register in my foggy early morning mind. Must do research and look up references to be sure this is real before posting an announcement to the website. Find references, read articles and available papers, and then post announcement and a link to an image and background information.

8:45- Discover emails regarding an outburst of an old nova, X Serpentis. What outburst? AAVSO is releasing a special notice? The comparison star sequence needs revisions? Now I am fully awake and moving quickly through the paces.

I log into the sequence plot program and variable star comparison database at AAVSO, plot charts with the existing photometry and check email notes regarding sequence issues. I make several revisions to the comparison stars, add some extra comps to the sequence and update the database within an hour or so of the announcement going out.

10:00AM- Doctor's office calls to remind me of my 9AM appointment for a physical! Oops. Completely forgot in all the rush. Re-schedule for Thursday.

10:15- While I have the sequence plotter and comp database open I address several other sequence issues in the current sequence team queue. Some revisions to the sequence for Nova Sgr 2009 #3 based on new photometry, revisions to the Mira W Aql sequence, and review the Chart Error Tracking Tool for new submissions and corrections made.

11:00AM- Call AAVSO to discuss education and outreach proposal with the Director.

11:30AM- Mom calls, while I'm in the middle of three things. Her timing is perfect as always. I tell her I love her and will call her back when I have a minute to breathe.

11:45- I notice my article for this week's Carnival of Space has been left out. I email the host and Fraser Cain at Universe Today.

12:00Noon- After a few emails back and forth, my article is now included in the Carnival and, 'oh by the way', I will be hosting the Carnival of Space this week! Fraser will send me all the material Saturday morning.

12:15- I make all the updates to the CV Section website, send out links to alert notices on Twitter, AAVSO Facebook and my Facebook page. I try to spread as much news about AAVSO and variable star activity over the net as I can every day. Today a lot is happening!

12:30- Lunch time?! What happened to breakfast?
I call Mom and tell her all about the trip to Chicago and New York city last week; and we discuss visitation and funeral arrangements for my nephew Matt Landry. I am also typing madly while talking to her to get my blog post Carnival of Space #116 posted before I have to go back to work.

12:50- While its on mind, I order flowers for the funeral home, make a donation to the memorial fund and make arrangements with Irene and Mom to go to the funeral Wednesday morning together.

1:30PM- Back to work, I send out a message to the southern observers on the AVSON mailing list that revisions have been made to the Nova Sgr sequence.

2:00PM- Call new members and print out thank you letters for donors. Update the mentor program student/teacher list. Scan read blogs for submissions to the Writers Bureau. Scan Portal to the Universe for astronomy and variable star news items.

2:30- Work on articles and format for Inner Sanctum, the AAVSO benefactor newsletter, due out in September.

3:00PM- Call Astronomics technical information to ask about LX90 and LX200 12" telescopes, features, mounts, databases, optics, etc. My Classic 12"LX200 is on its last leg and I need to buy another scope.

3:30- Work on AAVSO Newsletter articles for October 1 issue.

4:00PM- Email Michael Koppelman and Doug Welch to set up a Slacker Astronomy recording session. We settle on Tuesday night. OMG, that's tomorrow!

4:15- Work on reviewing VSX submissions for new variable stars. I send out questions on submission status to VSX moderators to clarify some questions I have.

4:30- Start dinner. Pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, pepper corn. Should be ready around 5:30. Start writing Simostronomy post about this crazy day.

5:00PM- Irene walks in, reminds me I don't have to work 18 hours a day, changes and heads out to water plants.

5:30- Dinner is served. See- planning is everything.

6:15- Call new young observer in CT, who was going to observe DQ Her for the AAVSO campaign with his club's 16" LX200 and CCD. Nobody home. I leave a message and compose an email to find out how he did.

6:45- Simostronomy post goes live. I make my To Do List for tomorrow, which includes all the things I didn't do today because the Universe had other plans.

7:00PM- Make a few more calls to new members on the left coast and southwest. Nobody home; Bummer. One of my favorite parts of this job is talking to the members. Draft emails and send them to be sure they hear from me within a week or two of joining AAVSO. I guess its quitting time for real now. Check the weather forecast. Bleh..
Add a little blurb to Simostronomy post and log off. See you tomorrow.

Answering the Call

This morning at 3:20AM I nearly fell off my chair in the observatory...literally.

Most of you know by now that I am a variable star observer. I have a 12-inch telescope in a dome I use to monitor several hundred cataclysmic variables for outbursts visually, and another 12-inch telescope in a roll off roof observatory that has a CCD camera doing photometry, more or less automated.

The visual monitoring program is sort of the astronomical version of a Chinese fire drill. I start in the east and work my way west through the night going from one variable star to the next as fast as I can. I make an observation in 60-90 seconds, log it, and move on. The reason for the rush is, it's a numbers game.

Most cataclysmic variables are too faint to be seen at all in a 12-inch scope when they are quiescent, not in outburst. Only when they erupt do they become visible. Most of the stars I follow outburst brighter than 15th magnitude, typically in the 13's or 14's. Some, like SS Cygni, get a lot brighter in outburst, and can be seen with binoculars.

Outbursts can last days or weeks depending on the star, but the thing is, they are totally unpredictable and they do not wait for anyone. If you miss a rare outburst, you may not get another chance for years, or decades. In some cases, never again.

On any given night only a handful of these stars may actually be active, out of the hundreds known. So the only way to be sure to catch them as they go into outburst, and to increase your chances of catching that rare find, is to observe as many of them each clear night as possible. I try to do at least 100 observations per night.

The majority of visual observations I log in a night are negative detections. In other words, I didn't see the star. It's not in outburst, or it's too faint for me to detect yet. When I log the observation I note the name of the star, the time to the nearest minute and the magnitude of the faintest comparison star I can see. For me, the limiting magnitude is usually between 14.8 and 15.2. On moonlit nights or under hazy skies that may drop to 14.5 or less, and on really fine, clear, dry nights I may occasionally glimpse a 15.5 comp star briefly.

When I report the observation it is written as 'less than the magnitude of the faintest comp star' (<14 .8="" a="" aavso="" activity.="" and="" area="" as="" basically.="" better="" br="" by="" can="" cv="" easy="" email="" fainter="" from="" i="" in="" it="" limiting="" lists="" magnitude="" morning="" my="" next.="" night="" of="" one="" other="" out="" quality="" report="" s="" see="" several="" sky="" slew="" so="" submit="" tell="" that="" the="" to="" track="" type="" typical="" you="">
So, back to my story.

Around 2:30 I start observing in Andromeda, which is just about straight overhead. The star dots have shrunken down to fine points and the seeing has obviously improved a lot. As I examine the field of V402 And I'm stunned to see the 15.8 comp star plain as day. I've seen it on CCD images before, but never in the eyepiece. I move to the next field, LL And and I can see the 15.9 comp star easily with averted vision. I would have to image this field for 60 seconds with a CCD and V filter to measure a 15.9 star, and yet here it is in my Mark I eyeball! The sky has literally opened up for me and I am seeing things in the eyepiece I have not even glimpsed before. I log more than a dozen more record magnitudes over the next 45 minutes and also manage to catch several CVs in outburst.

It's just me, the telescope and the Universe sharing an exceptional night together when suddenly the peace is shattered by -- RING-RING...RING-RING...RING-RING!

My very loud cell phone is ringing at 3:20AM. The obnoxiousness of it startled me so much I nearly fell off my chair. As I fumble to find it in one of my pockets in the dark, terrible thoughts start to run through my head. Did someone fall ill, get rushed to the hospital or die? Is it Mom? Maybe something happened to Dad. I answer the phone with my flashlight still in my mouth.

"Hewowe?"

"Mike, is that you?" It's my brother Doug, and the first thing that pops into my head as I take the flashlight out of my mouth is 'he's in jail and needs me to come get him.'

"Yea" I say rather irritated.

"I'm surprised you answered".
"I'm surprised you called. What's wr..." I never get the rest out because Doug is in full blown talking mode now. It's a one-way street. His mouth opens up and his ears shut down.

"I'm outside looking up at the most incredible sky I've ever seen." (Tell me about it.)
"Mars is talking to me, I can see Pluto and that little-dipper-like-thingy" (the Pleiades) "and oh my God, it's just beautiful, Mike."

I try to tell him the name of the cluster and that Pluto can only be seen with a telescope, but he'll never remember. My brother is drunk dialing at 3:20 in the morning and I was stupid enough to answer the cell without looking at the caller ID. Crap!

So after a few more 'I love you, mans' we hang up and its me and the morning sky alone again. I made a note in my log, DOUG CALLED!, and proceeded back to the business at hand. After my nerves calmed down a bit I started to chuckle to myself, because he was right. It was a beautiful sky, he knew I'd be out there at the telescope, and he just wanted to share the moment with me, bless his heart.

I took a little time to get lost in the Orion Nebula in his honor, and debated with myself if it was worth trying to chase down the Horsehead Nebula. I quickly came to my senses and got back with the program. I was rewarded for my efforts with three Orion CVs in outburst in a row, CN Ori, V1159 Ori and BI Ori--the Trifecta! This really was a great night!

I finished up in Auriga and Gemini about an hour before dawn and came in to warm up, eat breakfast and submit my reports. Out of 116 CV observations, 20 were active or in outburst. The rest are hiding away, biding their time, waiting to present themselves on another fine night.

Note to self:
Turn the cell phone on 'vibrate' when out at the telescope.

Carnival of Space #124

The Carnival of Space #124 is hosted this week at We Are All In the Gutter Looking At the Stars. Stories this week feature the Nobel Prize for the invention of the charged coupled device; the newly discovered ring around Saturn; The Andromeda Galaxy in ultra-violet, (definitely do click on the image for a gigantic view of the image!); results from astronomers studying the recent Solar System visitor, Comet Lulin; a nice piece on the annual meteor shower caused by the debris trail from Halley's Comet, mounting your binoculars for easier views; sunspots; some astronomy nostalgia, book reviews and much more.

Head on over to the Carnival and be careful, or you might learn something!