From HQ

Hello everyone,

We wanted to give you a little information about things happening at headquarters regarding Jeno Sokoloski's nova project and others.  The AAVSO is assisting Jeno's research by assisting with nova follow-ups and photometry, but we have some additional things we'd like to do. Our most important role in the research will be one that we already engage in, mainly notifying the community of possible novae and helping to confirm and monitor them during outburst. However, the AAVSO observer community has historically been engaged in many areas of nova research, especially through the Nova section. Our goals in the coming months are to increase our level of support for all areas of nova observation from nova searching, to discovery, confirmation, and follow-up, and to facilitate the work of the observer community to the fullest extent that we can.

We're living in interesting times in this field of research.  The proliferation of low-cost wide-field DSLR cameras can facilitate the search for novae, while the development of inexpensive spectroscopes now opens the field of spectroscopy up to the amateur community.  The latter point is particularly exciting, since it means that spectroscopic novae confirmation is now in the hands of amateur as well as professional observers.

In this thread, we welcome input on how the AAVSO can more effectively support the nova observing community and what your interests are as observers.
 

Matthew