plaidhat1

The AAVSO put out a call for observations of KIC 8462852 last month. Do these end up going to you or your team? What sort of observations would be most useful? What radio wavelengths are you looking at / planning to look at to investigate this star?

I'll send you email...

The basic advice I would give is the same for most any club: keep the books clean and set up bylaws that will encourage good governance. As for advice specific to an astronomy club: star parties. They're a great opportunity to interact with the public and get people interested not only in astronomy but in the club. Good star parties help to keep club members excited. If you can arrange to have someone (club member or otherwise) speak about a topic in astronomy at club meetings, that also helps.

Different organizations may have different rules about the specific color mapping, but many places use the Hubble Palette. Professional organizations which take pictures with monochromatic cameras will put filters in front of the detector to select a specific wavelength of light they want to capture. These wavelengths correspond to the ionized states of various elements or compounds. The Hubble palette, for example, maps Sulfur-II to "red", Hydrogen-alpha to "green", and Oxygen-III to "blue". The end result is picture which is not only pretty, it's scientifically useful.

I would be very interested in hearing more. I've used a smartphone for planetary imaging and have gotten a little detail on Mars, but have not been able to use it for long exposures.