Variable Star News

8 August 2009: New style web site launched.
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8 August 2009: The famous Eclipsing Binary Star Epsilion Aurigae goes into eclipse about now. See 
special page. 
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8 August 2009: John O'Neill reports that SS Cyg is in outburst, at mag 9.0 the previous evening.

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24 May 2009: James O'Connor, Dundrum, Dublin reports thats cataclysmic variable SU UMa is in super outburst. 
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A Supernova (SN2009dd) has appeared in NGC 4088 in Ursa Major. It is moderately bright (as supernovae go) at about 
magnitude 13 and a half. The SN is offset only a few arc-seconds SW of the galactic core.

Image taken by Liam Smyth with his 23.5cm SCT f/10. MX716 Starlight Xpress Camera; 
3 exposures of 20 seconds added as "Slew and Sum", making 60 secs in all. 
18th April 2009 at 2102 UT. 

John O'Neill observed it visually with a 25cm reflector at 144x. 18th April 2009. NGC 4088 itself was an easy object, while
the SN appeared as a faint, but definite stellar point.
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Epsilon Aurigae is one of the prime scientific targets for International Year of Astronomy 2009. The Eclipse starts
in August 2009.

For those new to variable star observing they should start off by practising on the Ten Star Tutorial. This can be found
at the AAVSO IYA 2009 page.

There was a Epsilon Aurigae stand at the Galway Astrofest in January 2009 and at Cosmos in Tullamore (March 2009).

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18 Feb 2007:

AAVSO/VSOG Stand at the 4th Galway Astrofest in January 2007.
A wide range of interest was shown in variable stars at this astronomy weekend. Featured were the dwarf nova SS Cyg and the 
"nova in reverse" R CrB.
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VSOG member Mary Glennon features on the AAVSO Web Site
and in their Observing Manual.