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2006 ASP Annual Award Winners

Amateur Achievement Award
Kamil Hornoch
Czech Republic

Kamil Hornoch has been one of the most active recent visual and CCD observers of comets, meteors (covering a variety of meteor showers), and variable stars in the world. He has made more than 2500 visual estimates and 2400 CCD measurements of comets (more than 16,000 CCD frames), 7200 measurements of positions of comets (all of high accuracy), and many position measurements of minor planets as well as measurements of their brightness. He has done many thousands of visual estimates and over 5000 CCD frames of variable stars. This past year he reached an unique result by discovering seven nova in M31 in Andromeda.

He is a young amateur astronomer, born in 1972 in the small village of Lelekovice, close to Brno, in the Czech Republic, where he still lives. He uses his own small telescope with a borrowed CCD SBIG camera. A big plus is that he also publishes promptly. His list of publications is very long; for example, on the ADS are listed 377 abstracts.

He has improved his visual observing accuracy so he reaches an accuracy of 0.03 mag, a very high standard. This value has been confirmed by separate photoelectric measurements. He is now doing most of his work with the CCD camera, again with high accuracy.

He is the leader in a local group of observers and has given public astronomical lessons on a local radio station, as well as working with other sections and authorities in the Czech Astronomical Society and the community.

Above all his work is characterized by a professional level of carefulness and high reliability and accuracy, and is a model for any other similar observers. Kamil Hornoch's long record of careful observations truly merits the Amateur Achievement Award of the ASP.