New Horizons

Hi all
I am going into territory I have never ventured into before.  I have never given any thought to variable stars before, never considered observing and recording them.  Lately, I have been reading up on them and it has me interested.  I am going to start off with some binocular variables from the AAVSO website.  It has been a long time since I commenced on something new and I look forward to beginning.
Paul

That is tremendous news, Paul.
I greatly respect variable stars -especially carbon stars.
One piece of advice I would give is to be patient with the www.aavso.org website.
You may have teething troubles logging in with your system of requesting important information from AAVSO at the beginning.
So do take your time printing off maps.
And take note of those 000- numbers that they love to use.
Whenever I try to estimate the magnitude of a particular variable, I do take my time doing no matter what optical equipment.
And I normally do one star an any given night -rather than estimate 3 or 4 variables.
But it may be far more different to you, Paul.

If you are in any trouble regarding any star at all, John O'Neill will always help you out.
He is a real expert helping folk on the www.aavso.org website.

Clear skies from Aubrey.

Hello Paul,

Welcome to the world of variable star observing. A good first reading is the AAVSO Visual Observing Manual (for free on their website).
www.aavso.org/visual-observing-manual

I have being observing variable stars seriously for over 25 years. I use a mixture of Binoculars and Telescopes depending on the brightness of the target. I have also done some CCD photometry.

Red Variables can be a bit tricky. I find putting them slightly out of focus helps in estimating them.

Feel free to PM me.

Best of luck,
John

Welcome along Paul, variable stars can surprise you ! especially when nothing is expected to happen. I've been looking at them for years, www.aavso.org as the guys have said is the place to go.

Me, I specialise in nova hunting, especially looking at those variables which are faint and can explode, becoming very bright. The holy grail is a the next supernova.

Two top one's to look at are RS Ophiuchus and T Corona Borealis. Theses are recurrent nova, it would be a distinguished honour to the person that discovers the next outburst as we still don't fully understand them.

Clear skies !

Keith..