October 31, 2013: Another supernova was discovered at ARO on October 30. 2013. It's currently known as PSN J18032459+7013306 until its type is determined. It was discovered by Nathan Gray - that makes him the youngest person to discover a supernova!

January 2, 2013: I was archiving the 2012 data today from my automated ARO, and as I do every year here are the weather stats. I was able to observe on only 37 nights in 2012 and collected 29.4 gigabytes of raw and processed data. This is because a hard disk crash brought the observatory down in March. It was not back up until mid-June, then I was just too busy to get my research program going again until early-November.

The ARO was available to observe for about 4 of 12 months, so extrapolated to a full year, that works out to about 110 nights per year - a bit better than average.

All of these nights were used for:

• variable star research, mostly observing campaigns initiated by the AAVSO and some observations of a few of stars for Mike Casey at SMU,
• the new, now stalled, Quark Nova search project, and
• early in the year observing galaxies for Kathryn Gray's supernova search.

My observation count with the AAVSO now stands at 11,507.