  Massive stars are rare but of paramount importance for their immediate
environment and their host galaxies. They lose mass from their birth through
strong stellar winds up to their spectacular end of their lives as supernovae.
The mass loss changes as they evolve and in some phases it becomes episodic or
displays outburst activity. One such phase is the Yellow Hypergiants, in which
they experience outbursts due to their pulsations and atmosphere instabilities.
This is depicted in photometry as a decrease in their apparent magnitude. The
object $\rho$ Cassiopeia (Cas) is a bright and well known variable star that
has experienced four major outbursts over the last century, with the most
recent one detected in 2013. We derived the light curves from both visual and
digital observations and we show that with some processing and a small
correction ($\sim0.2$ mag) for the visual the two curves match. This highlights
the importance of visual observations both because of the accuracy we can
obtain and because they fully cover the historic activity (only the last two of
the four outbursts are well covered by digital observations) with a homogeneous
approach. By fitting the outburst profiles from visual observations we derive
the duration of each outburst. We notice a decreasing trend in the duration, as
well as shorter intervals between the outbursts. This activity indicates that
$\rho$ Cas may be preparing to pass to the next evolutionary phase.

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics