I'm going to be giving a plenary talk at the upcoming AAS/Boston meeting in June. This talk will be on citizen science in the age of surveys, and so will highlight the current amateur community and its diversity (gender/age/geographic/equipment) and how I think it will be important in the future.
Plenary talks are always full of gee-whiz stuff: neat animations, gorgeous figures, superb layout and design. I'm no great Powerpoint person, tending to keep things pretty vanilla as I never know what kind of software/computer will be used, but I'll have to get fancy on this one (and I get a day of testing at the meeting to fix any glaring software gotchas).
However, what I am missing are photos. I need smiling faces in amateur situations: star parties, one-on-one mentoring, students, large telescopes with their owners, people using binoculars with professional posing/picture quality, etc. These photos will then go into our HQ library, including those that I don't use, and be available for other talks. They don't have to be AAVSO-centric, but the more sciency, the better.
If you have such photos, can you send them to me? What I would like is for people to upload the photos, preferably zipped into a single archive, to
ftp://ftp.aavso.org/upload/public/
(typical anonymous ftp)
and to send me an email indicating that the photos have been uploaded, along with any credit information (who took them, perhaps when/where, anything else that you want to include). If you have an interesting mpeg /avi of such activities, I might be able to use it too.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Arne