Hi Everyone, The joint meeting of the Society for Astronomical Sciences and AAVSO will be held May 19-21, 2009 at Big Bear, CA. This is the week before U.S. Memorial Day weekend and the annual RTMC Astronomy Expo held just a few miles from Big Bear. Abstracts from professionals and amateurs are now being accepted for proposed oral and poster presentations at the SAS/AAVSO meeting. Talks - for now - are scheduled to be be 20 minutes, including Q&A. We will have PowerPoint facilities (no overhead projectors, however). We prefer that files be pre-loaded onto our computer to minimize switch-over problems. The files can be loaded the day of the presentation, so you don't have to worry about having your presentation done in days in advance (does _anybody_ really do that?). Topics can be on anything of general interest to the SAS and/or AAVSO membership regarding observing, research, and pro-am collaborations. These include, but are not limited to, variable star observations (CCD/visual) and modeling, spectroscopy, asteroid photometry and modeling, general photometry, observing techniques, equipment, data reduction and analysis, and so on. The presentations _must_ be non-commercial in nature. We are hoping to stream audio and PowerPoint slides in real time. Those details are still being worked out and so there is no guarantee at this time. The deadline for submitting abstracts is March 13, 2009. The deadline for final papers is May 3, 2009. If you have any questions or would like to submit an abstract, please send an email to program_at_SocAstroSci_dot_org This email address sends the message to the entire program committee and assures that you will get a response. Abstracts can be in simple text as part of an email or a text/MS Word attachment. Do not include any graphics, tables, etc. There is no limit on the abstract save what common sense would dictate. However, brevity is not the name of the game, either, since the hand out at this year's meeting will be only the abstracts with the full papers provided as PDFs on a CD. It would be good, if reporting results of analysis or research, to include some highlights of those in the abstract. Please make sure that you use an email address that is "open", i.e., one to which we can reply without having to join buddy lists, wait for approval, etc., and is one that that you check frequently. We will be posting registration information, workshop topics and times, and more details on submitting final papers on the SAS web site shortly. I will send an email when that information is available. Finally, if you are part of other lists or organizations where this meeting would be of some interest, please pass it along. In particular, we would like to see a good representation from the professional community. Jerry Foote Program Committee and Trustee Society for Astronomical Sciences www.socastrosci.org/ ScopeCraft, Inc. 4175 E. Red Cliffs Dr. Kanab, UT 84741 435-899-1255 jfoote@scopecraft.com