Webinar: Recognizing AAVSO’s All Stars | 2025-01-11T19:00:00Z
Join us for a special webinar celebrating our stellar volunteers!
The star of this webinar is our vibrant community. Join us to learn about our volunteers’ valuable work, and the impressive impact of their observations and contributions. The discussion will touch on all aspects of the AAVSO, making this an ideal opportunity to learn more about the organization. You might even meet a new friend in the chat!
During one segment of this webinar, we intend to try something new: spotlighting audience members so that they can unmute and share how they are involved with the AAVSO. If you would like to speak up and share your story, we’ll need to send you a separate Zoom link, so please fill out this form first.
Webinar: Practice Makes Perfect: Getting Ready for the Next Galactic Supernova | 2025-02-01T19:00:00Z
Professor Dan Milisavljevic (Purdue University) will review and update plans for a coordinated global response to the next supernova in our Milky Way galaxy.
In this webinar, AAVSO members will have an opportunity to contribute ideas on how to best practice reacting to SNEWS alerts, leveraging the community’s geographic diversity and large numbers of small-aperture telescopes.
Webinar: Deciphering Eclipsing Binary Systems | 2025-03-01T19:00:00Z
ESA’s PLATO mission will use its 26 cameras to study terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. PLATO will also characterize planets’ host stars by studying tiny light variations in the starlight it receives. The analysis of the PLATO data will require more sophisticated stellar models than are available today.
In this talk, Dr. Pierre Maxted (Keele University) will describe the on-going effort by the PLATO stellar science team to calibrate the next generation of stellar models using observations of well-studied “benchmark” stars, and the role that citizen scientists can play in gathering data to characterize benchmark stars in eclipsing binary systems.
Webinar: Pandora’s Box: How NASA and Citizen Scientists Help Avert Disaster | 2025-05-03T18:00:00Z
This month, join Dr. Rob Zellem (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) as he talks about NASA’s Pandora SmallSat mission, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than Fall 2025 and will monitor >=20 transiting exoplanets and their host stars to disentangle stellar activity from the planet’s atmospheric signal. Pandora’s efforts will help enhance the science returns of NASA missions like Hubble and JWST.
Dr. Zellem will also present how citizen scientists and amateur astronomers can become involved and already are directly contributing to the Pandora mission and other NASA efforts