When the first edition of this book appeared in 1989, it offered no advice on observing with CCDs. Although CCD systems were available at the time to the professional community, they were very expensive, costing upwards of 70 000 US dollars. Today, CCDs are well within the reach of advanced amateur astronomers. A top-of-the-line system, the SBIG Research STL-11000M/CM, retails for about a sixth of that price, and it is far more capable than anything that was available in the 1980s.

With a CCD camera, your experience with variable stars will enter a whole new dimension. I realized this on a warm April night in 2004 when, as part of the spring meeting of the AAVSO, Wendee and I sponsored an evening observing session. I can't remember ever having so much fun. Two of the observers, including Tom Cragg visiting from Australia, were interested in checking on the state of T Pyxidis, one of their favorite recurrent novae. However, being pretty low in the southwest, the star was impossible to see visually with any of the available telescopes that evening.

Just a year earlier, our attempt to study T Pyx would have ended there. But on that night we used only a 15 cm reflector plus a Meade 416 CCD, and found the field a few degrees above the southwest horizon. Being thoroughly familiar with the field, Cragg had no trouble finding T Pyxidis and estimating its magnitude as 17.3! It was easy, productive, and fun.