[BAA Comets] Fw: ICQ archive now available via COBS

[Richard Miles]

Re. Johan's announcement below.

Remarkable that the BAA archive of comet observations number 88,196   i.e. 
many more than any other organisation.

Let's try and keep up the good work in the futrure.

Richard Miles

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Johan Warell" <johan.warell at gmail.com>
To: <comets-disc at britastro.org>; <comets-ml at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 3:20 PM
Subject: [BAA Comets] ICQ archive now available via COBS


> 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
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