Today was the first full day of the AAVSO DSLR Manual Workshop. The goal is to write a user's guide for people interested in doing DSLR photometry. Most of the participants gathered Thursday night for a two hour meet and greet session at headquarters, but the workshop kicked off Friday morning at 9:00 AM.
Rebecca Turner welcomed the participants, gave a brief overview of the goals and schedule of the workshop and then each of us was invited to introduce ourselves, tell where we are from, which working group we were in and a bit about why we were here and what we hoped to accomplish. We have attendees from Canada, Australia, Scotland, Germany and France as well as from all over the USA.
Shortly after 10:00 AM we broke up into our groups and scattered around head quarters. We had a group in the annex, a small group in my office, a larger group in the library, another in Rebecca's' office and a group in the west wing of the second floor office. We worked until noon, had a short lunch, then reconvened to discuss how things were going and to share progress and ideas for the way forward for the rest of the weekend. By 2:00 PM we were back to work and made steady progress, many of us working past the 5:00 PM quitting bell.
This whole thing is an experiment. Bringing together such a diverse group of people with the purpose of writing a manual for DSLR photometry is an ambitious plan. My impression of the first day was that we made terrific strides towards that goal. There was a noticeable buzz and a positive vibe in the building as groups began to wind down and disperse to go off to dinner and continued discussions this evening.
Tomorrow we'll be back at all day and we have Sunday morning to wrap things up before we all head to our four corners of the globe again.