Practical Astronomy November – variable stars

Variable Stars.

Observation of variable stars  has a long history with amateur astronomy. We will discuss the types of variable stars and how to observe them to obtain scientifically useful data. This is still a valuable activity even with the large survey telescopes as amateurs can obtain data for stars that are too bright for the large telescopes, or for certain types of variable stars where changes are happening rapidly, the survey scopes cannot be dedicated for short cadence observing of a single star.