the not so constant stars

There was a poignant note, to me, in the January 2012 issue of _Sky and Telescope_, reporting the Centennial meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.  I belonged to the AAVSO in the fifties, when I was in junior high.  What amateur astronomers did for them then was observe individual variable stars and note their magnitude changes over the weeks and months, by visually comparing them to nearby stars.  You were assigned a few stars a month (maybe per quarter), and the AAVSO would send you charts that showed where your variable was in the sky, along with charts that showed non-variable stars and their brightnesses.It's very subjective and not as easy as it may sound.  And the invention of the photoelectric photometer, which basically counts the photons from a star as they come in, meant that "eyeball" estimates were going the way of tube radios and steam engines.  The article noted that a huge telescope is being built, the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will make more measurements of variable stars in one night than the AAVSO did in a century.  So much for all those freezing nights when I was staring at Eta Geminorum and the stars around it, rather than smooching with a warm girl in a warm car.  (I also did variable star measurements in college in the winter of 1962, FMAO in the University of Oklahoma observatory, and may have done Eta.)   Of course that fancy synoptic scope is much more accurate, but it is not a time machine.  If you want to examine the light curve of Eta Geminorum in the middle of the twentieth century, some of those little dots will be mine.  It's funny, and a little fun, to think that hundreds of years from now, when my career as a novelist is only a footnote, those points will still be on that light curve -- unattributed, but unique, and perhaps less mortal than any literary record.Joe