It pains me that I feel Ithe need to post this but I sincerely believe that VSX "customer relations" needs serious attention.
I freely admit that I am a newbie in the AAVSO community, having previously dealt with the BAA-VSS and The Astronomer people whom I have always found friendly and helpful. Some days ago I found convincing evidence that one of the AAVSO comparison stars is actually an eclipsing variable. (All details and names are deliberately omitted below but those involved should recgnise the situation.) So I fired up the VSX wizard to report my discovery.
Being a newbie, I fully expected to be in communication with a moderator. What I did not expect was my perceived hostility and hypocrisy of the response. For instance, I used the AAVSO sequence coordinates for the star in question. I was told in no uncertain terms that Gaia cordinates should be used. In other words, "do as I say, not do as I do". Equally hypocritical, I was admonished for using Gaia magnitudes, despite Gaia positions (apparently) being mandatory, Another example: the VSX wizard offered "E" as an option for the type of the variable, which I chose because the data available at the time wasn't conclusive. I was told that I should have picked EA, EB or EC.
There were several other aspects of the communication which were significantly unpleasant in tone but I wo't detail them here. Contacts on the web indicate that my experience is far from unique.
Yes, this is a critical post but I sincerely hope that AAVSO can learn from it and pick up hints on how to improve their public face. I am very willing to suggest how this may be done without harming the (important IMO) rigor of the submission process.
I have to say that a result of my interaction I am unlikely to submit discoveries to VSX afgain or to take out an AAVSO subscription, The BAA-VSS appears to satisfy my requirements in a substantially more congenial environment.
Diplomacy is important!
Paul
Paul,
Thanks for your input. I can promise that AAVSO does it's best to communicate with people. I'm not sure who you communicated with, since I am a visual observer. However, please hang in there. I really appreciate your interest and input. I am on the mentorinig program, and do my best to communicate. I understand your frustration, and maybe we can get you a better contact person. Do you live in the USA or the UK?
Chris Stephan SET
Hi Paul,
I have looked at the emails sent to you by the VSX moderator. I am sure the hostility you seem to have perceived was unlikely to have been intended. Most of it was just sound advice, obvious to experienced VSX users but perhaps not to people who are fairly new to this. Proof is that he agreed with the points you mentioned that are confusing to users. Those have therefore already been changed (the variability type "E" has been removed from the dropdown list) or will be changed as soon as possible.
Email is sometimes interpreted incorrectly because it is less formal than a letter and lacks additional information from facial expressions or intonations that one gets during face to face discussions or telephone conversations. Adding to the confusion may be that the language in which the email is written may not be the native language of the author or reader. Of course we should make every effort to be sure that an email cannot be interpreted in any other way than intended. The fact that your experience does not seem to be unique makes this even more clear. We certainly welcome any suggestions for improvement you may have.
We are aware of the fact that due to the strict rules that are enforced for VSX submission it may sometimes be easier to get a refereed paper published than to get a submission approved in VSX. However once you gain a little experience with the idiosyncrasies it should be no problem.
I hope you continue to work through your submission and submit other discoveries to VSX as well.
Patrick
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your comments. Here's what I will do: I'll try to compose an "email" which imparts exactly the same technical information as in the moderator's response but which, in my opinion, is phrased in such a way that a newbie will take appropriate action without feeling offended and insulted. The before and after (or "compare and contrast" as British exam papers tend to say) versions will be posted here.
Please don't hold your breath because I'm very busy, at least in part with analysing the rather more interesting (IMO of course) X-ray transient in the same locality. Much of my time right now is actually taken up preparing to kit out my new house in La Palma where I've also purchased a half-way decent observatory
Hi, Paul,
I will start by saying that, since this is a volunteer organization, none of us really has the right to be overly critical of the efforts of others. That said, I have to agree with you. For most of my observing career, Ive used the charts from VSP uncritically, and only occasionally stopped using a comparison star because it looked "wrong" to me. All of that changed when I started doing DSLR photometry, which forced me to look at the tables accompanying the VSP charts. To my dismay, I discovered that many of the comparison stars had huge uncertainties - large enough in many cases to lead me to question their validity even as visual comparison stars (where the typical observer error is 0.1 magnitude). As a result I started using SeqPlot to widen my search for good comp stars, but even there I have found problems, problems I prefer not to discuss here. When I attempted (once) to "join the team" to try and improve the situation, I . . .let's put it this way .. was not greeted warmly.
So: you are not alone. My advice is to use your judgement, along with the extensive variety of resources available (starting with http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR) to check out the comp stars. As far as the AAVSO assets are concerned, you should, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, "Trust but verify". As for your particular issue, you must let your conscience be your guide. As to my own position, I keep my own counsel.
CS,
Stephen
Hello Paul,
Thank you for your input. VSX is a much-valued resource, extensively used by our professional and non-professional astronomical community for information on a large variety of variable objects. Through VSX, we aim to provide the best existing information on those objects, which means that we resort to state-of-the art catalogues for relevant data. For example, the space-based astrometric mission Gaia is used for stellar positions, whereas APASS magnitudes are recommended for brightness. We also try to provide as detailed and accurate online instructions for individuals who submit data, and also respond to email queries with clarifications. Our instructions are meant to assist our observers with the reporting process; the VSX moderators aspire to do the same.
At the same time, we are open to recommendations on how to further improve the procedure and better serve the community of observers such as yourself, who are eagerly reporting information on newly discovered variable stars. Specific examples, in which instructions are misleading and need further clarifications are particularly useful. I recognize that the process of submitting information on VSX is certainly not perfect and can be challenging at first, so your email will be of value. I am looking forward to reading your suggestions and brainstorm with you further.
Best wishes – clear skies,
Stella.
Hello Paul and others,
I've been submitting new variables to VSX since August 2017. I must agree that was extremely challenging at start. To start contributing, you need some minimum knowledge. If you don't know what are the types, you will fail too. I also had thousands of things to fix in my submissions, just because I didn't know many things before. For example, I found a semiregular variable with magnitude changes showing maxima and minima somewhere between 70-90 days. As the name "semiregular says", I thought that's not irregular, because I see changes with a period 70-90 days (that's why SEMIregular). So this is how I started incorrectly submitting with remarks "Period varies between 70d and 90d", before I found how to correctly calculate periods (because these are multiperiodic, so there are no period variations!). You get to know about these things only after you submit, from this what you’re asked to fix.
There are things that moderators may think these are obvious, but for a beginner - certainly not. The largest problem for me was plots. It took over three days to understand how to create a phased plot, which I never had to do before. It would be extremely simple with one sentence: "Add two cells to enter epoch and period, for a specified measurement calculate how many periods passed and then only get the value after comma (you can use TRUNC function in Excel)". Might sound simple, but one my friend gave up from submitting because of that! I haven't seen anything like that in FAQ or something.
And I should mention what is missing – the support is very low. I’m happy that I have a friend of mine, who is submitting too, so sometimes we can think about one variable. Mostly it’s about the type. But this is not open public. A few months ago I could ask Sebastian about almost any things, but then told me to ask on VSX forums. I understand that I might take a lot of his time, but the VSX forum is rather a failure. For now I asked 5 times about the type and I got an answer only once. I don’t know if those true rarities, but if anyone could simply give a try and share their thoughts. Some other users are not receiving any answers too, so how you can go through this thing? Submitting with incorrect type is rather the best solution, because you will probably learn later by e-mail why it is wrong. In the other way, you shouldn’t submit things you’re not convinced. So…?
Rules are strict, but I learned many things from it. After going through a few variables you start to understand how those things work. Starting from a moment where you barely knew what a DSCT variable is, now you try to figure out if a given star is RS/BY/ROT/TTS type variable. I guess I wouldn’t get any help on VSX forum, because only moderator told me (via e-mail) how to distinguish BY from RS.
Currently, the average time needed to submit a first variable is 10 hours + time needed to receive any answers about doubts from someone. Looking at other submissions is the best solution, however it can still be problematic (for example: my EA has secondary eclipse too, but his doesn’t have – what should I do now???? – and the problem starts, because you didn’t know you should write “Min II = 12.52 V” in Remarks). It’s not surprising that people don’t want to submit, because they waste a lot of time while they have real life stuff.
The best solution – make a good tutorial for VSX! I have written such tutorial for Polish magazine (and it’s in Polish too). I have done two out of three parts, which is 30 pages in A4. The last one would take another 10, but I haven’t started yet. From step-to-step, based on 159 my submissions so far and hundreds of e-mails from VSX moderators, I’ve written my comments what to do. What’s the result? My friend got asked about only two things – to enter a Gaia position and to deblend. This can be explained very easily – the article was written during UCAC4 era and deblending was planned to be written in third part. So, the whole article contained all needed stuff!
I’m sending two screenshots from my article. If you think that “Epoch” can be explained in one sentence – no, you are wrong. For a beginner all things must be told, so he can understand it. Look at some things that are written in English – you will never read those stuff anywhere until you get an e-mail from a VSX moderator (likely in a request to fix thousand things).
Regards,
Gabriel Murawski
I was part of the VSX team on and off for about 3 years, reviewing Astroph papers for VSX submission. I too have encountered the problems and issues discussed above. It was frustrating that it always seemed that I was playing "catch-up" with respect to what types of data needed to be included in submissions. It seems that this is a common ocurrance particularly for us amateurs who are constantly climbing a very steep learning curve.
So I have a suggestion that will hopefully help this problem. It seems to me that what VSX needs is a guide or manual such as the CCD photometry guide, visual/DSLR observers manual, or VStar User's Manual. All of these documents are excellent and give consistant and accurate information on what to do or not do for their specific application. They are routinely updated to add new information, correct errors, etc. VSX has none to this, so each contributor, mostly newbies, are thrown into the deep end to try to determine what to do. The VSX moderator and staff are excellent technical experts but may be overworked.
So, if AAVSO can create a VSX user's document similar to the other documents, that would help the newbies learn how to submit their information, provide a common "specification" for submission. and hopefully reduce the workload of the VSX team. So we would know, for example, to use Gaia for position but APASS for magnitudes. I always got confused converting Kepler mags to V mags. While this won't be perfect, it looks like a good start. Additionally, it would be a great project for members to work on. The VSX experts would have to lead and guide the effort and vet all of the inputs to the document, but the members could be instrumental in working the document. David Benn has just started such a task for VStar documentation (among other tasks).
Anyway that's my 2-cents worth...I think it would go a long way to solving this problem.
Dave
Thank you all for your input - this is great feedback and will help us device procedures to serve you, our community, better. Actually, we would appreciate working with you to draft such a "beginner's guide", as your experience with VSX will greatly help... let's form a team! what do you think?
Best wishes - clear skies,
Stella.
I think a VSX documentation team is what is needed. However, it seems to me that to get started we need two things:
1. Buy-in from the AAVSO, since there may be costs associated in producing such documentation that should not be paid by the members, other than what is normally supported by their annual dues and funds raised during the yearly campaign.
2. A firm comittment from the VSX experts, who will necessarily lead this effort, that this is something they are willing to support. If they are not on board, it makes no sense to pursue this.
For my part, I will certainly contribute where I can, but the decision is really up to AAVSO and the VSX moderator and staff.
I think the simplest and most user-friendly solution to navigate this difficult system, is to design an intuitive and helpful interactive form that prompts the user to enter the appropriate data into each field as one goes along. Make it anticipate the common pitfalls and errors beginners may do, and reformat all the amateurish user input automatically into the VSX rigorous style. User manuals can be helpful, but most busy people don't have the time to read through a long, complex book! So, it is far better to have the app do all the hard work for you. AI is the trend nowadays :)
Of course, this will involve a lot of back-end work by developers, for a complex system as this, but once it is completed, it will work forever going forward, and these kinds of complaints will fade away.
OTOH, AAVSO (and Astronomy in general) is always short on funds, and relies heavily on volunteers. I am always so impressed and grateful for the hard work all these people do for no money! Very few places in the world have such good fortune.
Mike
Mike -
many thanks for your kind words about the organization!
I also appreciate everyone's suggestions about how we can improve what we do. We can't always act on all suggestions, but they do get us thinking!
VSX is an amazing resource and the explosion of "big data" has me amazed at how Sebastian, Patrick, and everyone else on the team can keep up! Thanks to all of the team, and thanks to all members, observers, and researchers who use VSX!
A thought: if VSX wasn't so important, this thread would never have existed in the first place.
KL
Hi All,
I worked with Sara Beck to build the LCGv2...great fun!
I recently acquired a web site, svg-stars.org (It's empty at the moment). It is intended to be graphically presented to users, similar to LCGv2's, SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) colorful format.
The front end of this site is a UI that allows the user to request various stars, and display them in the universe. Your wonderous VSX database is the key to this site: Without it, I could not attempt to build the site.
Therefore, I will build & demonstrate the UI request form, providing guidence for users and web deveolopers. It will be placed online at my site as a help for anyone who wants to request various stars with a specifed profile. However, I need your assistance. I encourage your input on just how to structure the UI. It will be presented online at my site as it evolves.
The User Interface currently provides two(2) features:
1.) The user can request a string of comma-separated star identities,
which will display in the universe.
2.) The user can request any VSX data table by setting the desired
profile. It automatically builds the url.
Basically what I could use at the moment is how to use the same
profile request as in item 2 to
return only the data, not the table layout , in a CSV format. I need a
url that returns only data, not an HTML table.
See: http://SVG-Stars.org/AAVSO-VSX-UserInterface
Regards, Francis
I was wondering what the full extent of the data that is available for each star in VSX. The application I am building for svg-stars.org can use the following:
Radius(solar), Mass(solar), Temperature(solar), Color Index, Solar Luminosity, and Distance from earth(parsecs)
Are any of those values available, or scheduled to be added in the future?
(I also can use its exoplanets, but can access that data from other databases.)
Thanks, Francis