The 10-Star Training Tutorials are designed for novices who have no prior experience observing variable stars. It is a walk through of how to find the star, how to make an estimate and how to submit the estimate to the AAVSO. If you are new to the AAVSO then these are great tutorials to get you started.
Thanks to volunteer Rani Ahmed, the 10-Star Training Tutorial is now available in Arabic!
We hope that new observers will find this tutorial very useful for learning how to make their first variable star estimates. Since no prior experience is required, the 10-Star Training Tutorials are also ideal for use in schools and clubs.
In addition to the English and Arabic versions, the 10-Star Training Tutorial is available in Polish, Turkish, and Chinese. There is also a Southern Hemisphere version available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The bright, long-period, eclipsing binary star epsilon Aurigae is predicted to begin its next eclipse late July or early August of 2009. The AAVSO is participating in a global campaign to record this eclipse as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebrations, organized by the Citizen Sky project (http://www.citizensky.org). Epsilon Aurigae is now past solar conjunction and has reappeared as a morning object.
