[BAA Comets] ICQ archive now available via COBS

[Johan Warell]

Dear comet observers,

We are happy to inform you that the ICQ archive has now been uploaded to
COBS, and that all those community-sourced but previously unavailable
observations are now freely accessible for inspection and analysis!

The number of new observations from the ICQ archive is nearly 113 000,
bringing the total number of entries in the COBS database to 220 000. The
number of observers is over 2200 and the number of observed comets 1100.

The best observed comet is C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) with 15529 observations,
the top association is the BAA with 88 000 observations and the top country
USA with over 25 000 contributions. The earliest observations stored are of
comet 12P made in 1884. A statistics summary may be found at
http://www.cobs.si/statistics

The observations which have been imported from the ICQ archive may be
identified with the ICQ## string in the publication code, where ## is the
ICQ newsletter no. where it was published. We have a few hundred
observations where the observer ID is not known, the ICQ format is in error
etc. We are working to get these data imported as well.

The country and association statistics are not completely reliable as this
information is not available from the ICQ; most of these observers have
received the association code ICQ and the country is unassigned. We hope
that the directors of the national societies who contribute data will be
able to assist us in checking the database to complete this information.

We also suspect that there are a lot of observations in
personal/national/association archives which have not been reported to
either ICQ or COBS. We will be happy to import such data as well,
regardless if some observations may already be present in COBS. Please
contact us if you know of such data sets.

Any observer with a personal account can login to their user profile on
COBS and check the country and association assignment to make sure that
their data is handled correctly. Please let us know if you have any
problems or questions.

For the COBS team,

Johan Warell
COBS Assistant Administrator