[BAA Comets] Comet Section Meeting
Shanklin, Jonathan D.
jdsh at bas.ac.uk
Tue May 21 22:34:47 BST 2013
[With apologies for the delay - I initially sent this to wrong list. J]
We had a great meeting on Saturday, thanks to Denis, Nick, the local hosts and all the speakers. If you missed it, we hope to put a recording of the meeting and the speakers presentations on the web, and I will also be including notes in the newsletter.
I think we were all in agreement that procedures need to be as simple as possible. One aspect of this is not having lots of different reporting formats. So for astrometry the MPC format has to be used to send to them, with a copy to Guy Hurst. For photometry, whilst the ICQ format has its faults, it is the international standard so this should be used for submitting magnitude estimates to me. I can convert these to TA format for those that want their observations published in the TA magazine and so will convert observations to this format to pass on to Guy. There is no need to separately send them in TA format to Guy, but if you see something unusual do let him know so that he can put out a TA e-bulletin. We probably need some additional ICQ codes to cover newer instruments and these need to be agreed on. Images for the gallery need to be named according to the standard format - no more panstarrs.jpg please! The BAA hopes to develop a web interface that will allow easy submission of all types of observations.
Roger Dymock has developed a good procedure for extracting visual equivalent magnitudes from images. It is daunting at first, but becomes easier with practice, however the linkage between different bits of software could be improved to reduce processing time. This is also something that we hope to develop.
We are in the process of updating the Observing Guide, and several suggestions were given at the meeting. If you have other suggestions please let me have them. We were hoping to have this finished for the Exhibition Meeting, but early autumn now looks more likely.
We have plans for another meeting, in the form of a workshop where you can go through image analysis procedures yourself, with mentors on hand, some time in the next 12 months.
Jonathan Shanklin
Director
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