There are organizations around the world that have members and contributors who submit the results of the study of variable stars, and these results are archived in databases. The two organizations I wish to note here are the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) and the Variable Star Section of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand (VSS of the RASNZ).

The URLs of these two organizations are:

• http://www.aavso.org
• http://www.rasnz.org.nz

On the RASNZ web site follow the link to "RASNZ Sections" and then the link to "Variable Star".

Both of these organizations provide comparison star charts for variable star observers, and have very large databases of variable star observations, which can be accessed by interested observers.  In general, the AAVSO has more content online, as well as a light curve generator.

One particularly fascinating aspect of the AAVSO light curve generator is that you can instruct the interface to highlight the observations that you have submitted to the AAVSO, so that you can see how your observations compare with those of others. If you submit your own observations online through the interface known as Web Obs, they will be available for you to see often within 15 minutes. An example of output from the AAVSO light curve generator, with a user-selected format, is shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Example of output from the AAVSO light curve generator. Visual observations are grey plus signs, photometric observations are green plus signs. My visual observations are highlighted by purple boxes.