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Re: New Guy
Michael K and all,
This is not like you are in school and someone knows the answers. We do
not know the answers. (Not quite true as you have fount out, some of the
people here know some of the answers.) This is one of the features that
makes this research. The reason I have sent out all those disks (25 at
last count) is so that we can work out the best way to research this
data. Once we pick out the obvious variables and report the new ones we
will then have to come to grips with what we do about the suspicious ones.
Where to report? We have even to decide how to tell the world that we have
found a new object. There are many possibilities. We could publish our
own catalog with our own determination of what we think is variable and
what type of variable it is. We could just publish the raw data. We could
publish just the data that seems to be from variable objects and the mean
value for the rest. We could not publish and keep everything secret and
sell new variable star data to the highest bidder (OK, for the humor
impaired, I am kidding on the last one).
There are standard places to report. Like IBVS and AAVSO. But I think we
are somewhat unique in that we will have a lot of data. We are also unique
in that we (I at least ) are attempting all sky uniform coverage. Many
surveys go where the stars are so that they poorly cover sparse areas.
Data Set 22 is about 10% of a year's worth of data taking. I have two more
telescopes near operation so that I will soon be taking data the size of
DS-23 about once a week. If others operate their telescopes then we can
more than double that again.
As a survey we will be unlikely to take enough data to tell everything
about a star. So we will need follow on observers. I realize that I made
a bad choice (the stars are setting and not available for observation) in
the measurements of Data Set 22. I am now reducing data around 12 to 14
hours. You will then be able to find an interesting object in the new data
and take your telescopes out and observe it. All those star measurements
should give you lots of comparison stars.
My personal plan is to mostly take data and make it available. I plan to
leave the discovery and the classification to others. Well, I will do some
of it for fun. I will mostly stick to what I know to do which is to build
and operate systems.
This is not to say that there are not experts here. There are experts
lurking, and some quite active. You will find that each has their own
opinion as to what is best to do. We just have to sort it out.
This is what makes it fun. This is pretty pure anarchy. But there is a
goal, at least for me. That is to do some good science.
BTW, Michael, welcome to the list.
Tom Droege
At 08:59 PM 5/22/02 -0500, you wrote:
>Hey dudes.
>
>I'm new to the list. Tom was kind enough to send me the new CD of data. I'm
>starting simple and want to verify my logic. Please excuse my newbieness. I
>want to make sure I have the basic process down.
>
>First I ran the wsv3.pl script on the collected.big file. Then I opened it
>in Excel and sorted by the ws column. To keep it easy I deleted all the
>records with ws values less than 1. This left me with just over 9000
>records. The one at the top had a massive ws value of 879. I grep'd the data
>for this star out of the collected.big file and graphed it and it showed an
>obvious brightening. I entered the average coordinates into VizieR and it
>seems this star (number 89 from the collected.big file) is RW Mon.
>
>If it hadn't shown up in the GCVS I would go through the processed described
>on http://www.tass-survey.org/tass/suspect.html. This sound ok?
>
>I'm not sure where I can best add value here, but one thing I could easily
>do is write a script to interact with SIMBAD or VizieR to look for probable
>matches for stars with ws > 1. This is my current intention.
>
>Question: do the GCVS and NSV catalogs have most "known" variable in them?
>
>Cheers,
>Michael Koppelman
>http://www.lolife.com/astronomy/