IAUC 183

[Doug Welch <welch@physics.mcmaster.ca>]

I have just returned from IAU Colloquium 183 in Taiwan
("Small Telescope Astronomy on Global Scales") and am
putting together a summary of the meeting and my reactions
to it. Just catching up on reading the e-mail I've missed 
in the past week, I have to say that the idea of producing
a useful, portable database backend for survey systems
would be real achievement. It is definitely a weak point
in many of the planned small telescope operations. Getting
a few surveys to share such a database interface would
be a significant achievement. (This would likely have to
be a PostgreSQL database if it were to be usable by most of
the workers I heard at the meeting.)

Cheers,
Doug