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E. O. Waagen, J. A. Mattei (deceased 22 March 2004), R. T. Pellock, S. J. Beck, K. Davis, K. H. Malatesta, G. Menali, A. Price, M. Saladyga, S. T. Sechelski, M. R. Templeton (AAVSO)
The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) recently completed a two-year, NASA-funded project to validate over 9.5 million (mostly visual) variable star observations in the AAVSO International Database from the AAVSO's founding in 1911 through 2001. As a result, approximately ten million variable star observations - going back a century or more for some stars and all contributed by over 6,000 amateur astronomers around the world - are available online to the scientific community, giving you immediate access to this treasure trove of historical data. The validated data will also be placed on the NASA/IPAC-IRSA site and in other NASA databases, making the AAVSO data even more widely and easily available for astronomical research, education, and public outreach.
We describe the AAVSO Validation Project's goals and completed tasks, as well as the WWW infrastructure already in place to serve the scientific and educational communities and the public. We describe how you can obtain and use these data in your research, as well as how the AAVSO can assist and collaborate with you in your scientific, educational, or outreach endeavors. We give examples of validated data available now, and describe our future plans to keep the AAVSO International Database current by continuing to validate data contributed since 2001.
The AAVSO gratefully acknowledges NASA grant NAG5-12602 for providing funding for the AAVSO Data Validation Project.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.aavso.org. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: aavso@aavso.org
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.