Hello Everyone,
For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Bert Pablo, staff astronomer at the AAVSO. These past few months I have been working closely with the observing section leaders to refresh and update the observing sections. This has been a very beneficial process so far and one of the places we have been focusing on are the observing section pages which you can find links to here:
https://www.aavso.org/observers#sections
This is where we thought community input would be useful. We know that the content needs to be updated, but beyond that we would like to make the observing sections more uniform, so that you can find the content you need without having to learn a new format every time you go to a new page. To this end, we want to know what pieces you like from the various observing sections that we should try and replicate on the other pages. We would also like to know if there is any specific information/links etc. you would like to see?
One thing I want to assure of is that we understand each observing section is different and that they will have different needs. We aren't looking to make them all identical or to remove the parts that make them unique, our aim is simply to be inclusive and easy to follow as we possibly can within these constraints.
With all that said, please take a look at the pages above and let us know your thoughts. Our main goal with this project is to make a better framework for the AAVSO community and we really value your input. Feel free to respond to this forum, or if you would prefer, by emailing aavso(at)aavso.org and we will make sure it makes it to the appropriate people.
Thanks,
Bert Pablo (on behalf of the section leaders)
Staff Astronomer, AAVSO
How about colour coding for each section but with homogenous page design across the pages? Something that would need just one CSS external sheet for the cross-page styling (font size, margins, line spacing etc) which could then include ID declarations for each separate page (heading text colour, etc) - so just one extra style sheet to keep it simple?
I would like to see a listing of the generally agreed upon stellar questions that remain unanswered. I assume that the various organizations of professional astronomers have determined what they consider to be the stellar issues that they would like to better understand. From time to time I will read an article on variable stars that mentions not knowing why or how something happens (e.g. long secondary periods in LPVs). I observe several LPVs but don't really know the main questions that astronomers are working to resolve. Listing some of these issues within the Observing Section might help me to better understand the issues and to help AAVSO personnel like me to target their observations.
Thanks,
Rich Glassner GRIB