I am a happy member of the AAVSO. The organization organizes amateurs and professionals on a global scale who are interested in variable stars; furthermore, the AAVSO has built up and maintained crucial parts of the infrastructure of variable star astronomy: the VSP, the VSX, the JAAVSO. I gladly pay the membership dues.
But the Twitter account of the AAVSO is way off. Some recent headlines: “A galaxy without dark matter??!!”, “Astronomers have made the first definitive detection of a radioactive molecule in interstellar space… #aavso #coolscience”, “A young star devouring its planet??!!!” et cetera et cetera.
Frankly, in my opinion, this is not what AAVSO’s about; I can get my daily fix of this gosh-wow popular science elsewhere, and it doesn’t guide me when developing my observing programmes and it doesn’t provide me with a high-density feed of information on what is going in variable star astronomy.
