Today, as an independent, private research organization headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with active participants in 108 countries, and an archive of over 23 million variable star observations, it is the world’s largest association of variable star observers.
Membership in the AAVSO is open to anyone-professionals, amateurs, and educators alike-interested in variable stars and in contributing to the support of valuable research.
Professional astronomers have neither the time nor the telescopes needed to gather data on the brightness changes of thousands of variables, and amateurs make a real and useful contribution to science by observing variable stars and submitting their observations to the AAVSO International Database.