Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sun, 07/08/2012 - 15:56
As Brian Warner pointed out recently, the 2012 proceedings from SAS/AAVSO (Big Bear, CA) are available at:
http://www.socastrosci.org/publications.html
specifically
http://www.socastrosci.org/images/SAS_2012_Proceedings.pdf
One article of note: High Time Resolution Astronomy or High Speed Photometry
by Gary A. Vander Haagen (pg. 165).
High speed photometry can create millions of data points in one night. Is the AAVSO International Database ready to accept such large data streams? Or will we leave the raw data with the researchers, and wait for the published papers?
Hi Tom,
Thanks for pointing out that future problem!
The AID can keep up with that kind of data; what fails are the supporting tools. If the LCG has to plot 2M points in its default 400-day window, it takes a relatively long time to access the observations and to generate/transfer the plot. In QuickLook, single datasets from other observers would get lost in the flood of observations from the high-cadence site. We see that to some extent now with the CV time series.
We're already planning to go to a CCD Points concept rather than a raw observation count for CCD observations; otherwise, a million-point time series would seriously distort our awards. Likewise, I expect that the AID observation count and many of the tools will change over the next few years to better handle the different cadence of observations for a particular object.
Arne
Arne, please could you explane the "CCD Point concept"? I don't realy know what it can be. Thanks!
Hi Robert,
Aaron came up with "CCD Points" several years ago when editing the CCD Views publication that we used to have. The basic idea is to weight observations based on their value and difficulty. If it was a transformed measure, that was worth more than an untransformed measure; a time series was worth less than an equivalent number of estimates of individual variables; observations in support of a campaign were worth more; etc. No scheme can be perfect, but just a raw count of total submitted observations does not come close to the true picture, especially for CCD observers. We've done something similar in the past for those visual observers working on the Orion variables since they could do several estimates in the same time span that other observers might use to measure separate fields. The Orion variable observations were weighted less when determining a visual observer's totals.
Arne