My name is Albert Dill. While I have been interested in astronomy and using telescopes for about 35 years, I was just bitten by the "variable star bug" about 16 years ago in 1992. While on an electronic service called GEnie I ran into a group of observers really weren't holding much of a conversation, just passing information on the behavior of certain stars, although I didn't understand what they were doing at the time. I must say I was intrigued by these people who were so serious about what they were doing! After some investigation I found that they were making a real contribution to science with nothing but an eyeball, a telescope and some very carefully prepared charts. After that first encounter I bought David Levy's book "Observing Variable Stars" and spent a few months with binoculars practicing on Delta Cephei and Eta Aql just to convince myself that I could actually see the change in these stars that others did. With a good measured set of stars to compare the brightness of the variable to, one can acutally get to an accuracy within a couple of tenths of a magnitude. To my amazement, the light curves that I made of those two bright cepheids made sense and even showed the correct periods!
At that time I intiated my first contact with the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) and have been a member ever since. This group collects, validates, and archives varible star observations from around the world, and has done so since 1911 when they were chartered by Harvard College Observatory. Click here for a brief history of the AAVSO. The organization is still going strong, recieving 400,000 observations per year from 700 observers who do it just for the love of it. Although the focus has changed over the years from Mira stars to the cataclysmics and some other exotic types of variables, there still seems to be some use for us. Below are links to some light curves that will illustrate my involvement with the program. The first link is to some visual curves with my observations highlighted in blue. My "fainter than" observations show up as a green triangle. The second link is to my own ccd light curves of eclipsing binary stars.
