As we get more telescopes in the AAVSOnet farm, we are starting to use volunteers to act as telescope advocates instead of increasing the duties of HQ staff. The first of these is Ken Mogul, who is taking over the supervision duties of Mike Simonsen for K28. This transfer of roles makes perfect sense, as a large fraction of the images from K28 are for a research project for Ken! He already knows the quirks of the system, and can now use his expertise in keeping the system running smoothly.
A telescope advocate makes sure that images are processed properly. Every night that new data arrives from one of the AAVSOnet telescopes, those images are first archived and then processed. The resultant images are transferred to the ftp site and/or a VPHOT account, and a message to the researcher is generated to let them know new images are available. The advocate oversees this process by examining jpeg versions of each image, looking for possible problems, contacting HQ and/or the telescope site manager if something important is going wrong. Their notes regarding the images get archived in a database and can be inspected at a later date to see when a problem first occurred or to look for why some photometric value might be incorrect.
Welcome, Ken, to the team!
Arne