AAVSOnet status, 2017-06-30

HQA

Affiliation

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Fri, 06/30/2017 - 11:57

Here is the status of the various telescopes in the network.

BSM_Berry operational

BSM_Hamren operational, though the camera sensor needs to be cleaned.

BSM_HQ operational

BSM_NM still working on commissioning after changing the mount. In addition, this is the southwestern monsoon, so little observing is expected until September.

BSM_S operational

SRO50 camera has a sticky shutter and will likely be sent back to SBIG soon. In addition, this is the southwestern monsoon.

TMO61 mostly operational, though it has had a few intermittent failures with the mount and dome controllers. It will be shut down for a week while the site manager is away, and in addition, this is the southwestern monsoon.

OC61 operational again after its shutdown to repair the secondary focuser. It will take a few days to acquire sufficient flats to process data.

There are numerous improvements expected for the network over the next 6 months or so, including the continued development of the BSM section. I remind everyone that AAVSOnet is a free member benefit. If you have a project for which telescope time is needed, submit a proposal!

Arne

nmi

Affiliation

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Sat, 07/01/2017 - 16:14

BSM scope schedules?

Arne

Is there a way for us to see what is scheduled on each of the BSM scopes?

Mike

nmi

HQA

Affiliation

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Sat, 07/01/2017 - 16:51

BSM Scope Schedules

Hi Mike,

The answer is "it depends." For the BSM systems, there are two major projects called "BSM_North_Survey" and "BSM_South_Survey". These are set with low priority and fill in the gaps between requested projects. Overall, these two major survey projects occupy about half of the observing time on the BSMs. You can find what objects are in the survey projects by looking at

https://www.aavso.org/bright-star-monitor-stations

and clicking on the links about 2/3 of the way down. Their photometry gets analyzed whenever I do an epoch photometry database update (about once/year). The EPD is a separate database, available through the "data" menu on the AAVSO home page, and is not plotted by the LCGv2 (yet).

The remaining targets are those that have been submitted by various researchers, and there is no good up-to-date master list of those targets. Most come through the proposal path, such as for Frank Schorr's hump miras or a set of 25 underobserved miras for Gustav Holmberg. There are maybe a hundred or so of such targets in maybe a dozen projects, so it is not a complex issue to administer them.

I'm hoping that the new BSM section chair (hint) will keep a master list of all BSM targets, who "owns" them, the start/stop dates, and any other ancillary helpful information! That might be useful to publish on either the AAVSOnet forum or the AAVSOnet web pages on a regular basis.

Arne

nmi

Affiliation

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Sat, 07/01/2017 - 17:30

Remaining Targets List

Thanks Arne,

<I'm hoping that the new BSM section chair (hint) will keep a master list of all BSM targets, who "owns" them, the start/stop dates, and any other ancillary helpful information! That might be useful to publish on either the AAVSOnet forum or the AAVSOnet web pages on a regular basis.>

I'd like to get right on it!

I see the North and South survey list but I don't know how to see the "remaining targets". How do I see the proposals; approved and pending? What am I missing?

Mike

HQA

Affiliation

American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Sat, 07/01/2017 - 17:58

remaining targets list

Hi Mike,

There are four segments to running AAVSOnet:

1. Equipment installation and maintenance. This is usually done by the site host, such as Peter Nelson with BSM_South, but with interfacing with some supervisory level person who can authorize repairs and funding.

2. Proposal submission, acceptance and monitoring.

3. Operations, including importing new plans, open/close, working with the observers to ensure they get the data they need.

4. Pipeline processing, whether through HQ or through the new BSM scheme, and transfer of the images to a place that the researcher can access.

There are some ancillary steps, such as the creation of the epoch photometry database or the calculation of transformation coefficients, that are done outside of these four major areas. Overall supervision and planning for the network is an even higher-level aspect to AAVSOnet.

What you are asking for falls under item #2, the scheduling aspect of AAVSOnet. If you are a member of the TAC, you can see the entire proposals list at

https://www.aavso.org/apps/aavsonet/

I think if you are an individual proposer, you will only see your proposals and not others. As BSM chair, you should be able to see the entire list - let me know if that is not the case.

As for seeing what active projects/plans are on each telescope, there are two methods. For BSM_HQ and BSM_NM, I believe, there is an ACP web page for each telescope that gives you all of the status information. I'm not sure this is possible for all AAVSOnet telescopes, depending on their firewall access and uptime. For all of the AAVSOnet telescopes, there is TeamViewer access to the desktops, where you can look at the Scheduler browser and see what plans are in effect. The difficulty with looking directly at the telescopes is that the proposer and proposal are not obvious in all cases - you see what plans are in effect and their details, but not the big picture.

George Silvis' ASA scheme was created specifically to address this problem, in that there is a master repository for all plans managed by ASA, no matter on what telescope the plans executed. That said, maintenance of observer projects and plans is one of the difficult aspects of running AAVSOnet.

Arne