blazar

Campaign was updated in Special Notice #62 and Special Notice #77.

July 24, 2012: The blazar BL Lac, the prototype of this class of variable objects, has brightened in the optical and radio wavelengths. ATel #4271 (Sh. A. Ehgamberdiev et al., http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=4271) on July 23 announced this brightening. The ATel team reported that "the source brightness has recently increased from R = 13.66 +/- 0.01 on July 19.82 to R = 12.60 +/- 0.01 on July 22.97.

January 11, 2011: Dr. Kirill Sokolovsky (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn) has requested the assistance of AAVSO observers to obtain optical photometry of the blazar-type quasars 3C 273 and 3C 279 during 2011. The observations obtained by AAVSO observers will be combined with multiwavelength observations - from radio to gamma-rays - as well as with very long baseline interferometry with the VLBA to obtain a better picture of what these objects are and how they vary.

November 18, 2010: As was noted by AAVSO observer E. Erdelyi (Carlsbad, CA, USA) in a post to cvnet-discussion, the BL Lac object 3C 454.3 (AUID 000-BDC-612) appears to be undergoing a bright flare; the object was recorded by Erdelyi at V=13.659(0.013) on 2010 November 10.2708 (JD 2455510.7708). The last flare of comparable brightness was observed in 2007, when the object reached V ~ 13.4 around JD 2454335 (late August 2007).

The AAVSO has held three Professional-Amateur meetings in collaboration with NASA, Sonoma State University, and New Mexico State University

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