[vsnet-obs 21879] MAYDAY MAYDAY, drowning in e-mails

[Alfons Diepvens <alfons.diepvens@ping.be>]

Dear all,

Since about 1.5 to 2 weeks, I daily download about 500(!) e-mails from
VS-Net obs and VS-Net Mira alone. 500 messages correspond roughly with
about 1 megabyte. How is one supposed to sift the grain from the husk?
Nobody is going to read this amount of information.

Giving information on the behaviour of variable stars is indeed of utmost
importance for a variable star observer. The "Mira recent" messages are OK,
you get a short overview of the light changes and one can compare the
results with those of other observers. However, a daily update of these
"Mira recent" is an overkill. I think it suffices to do this weekly. A Mira
doesn't change significantly in one day...

Dealing with the "observation needed" messages, it would be wise to
seperate the Mira/SR's from the NSV's for example. The observer can still
choose to subscribe for either type of variable, being Mira/SR or NSV. It
is a nice initiative to bring these stars under the attention (those NSV's
indeed need to be obseved), but not everyone is interested in them. Hence,
my suggestion to split these messages into categories like the ones mention
before.

I guess (hope) I am not the only observer who thinks like this. I would
like to hear your opinions on this subject.

Kind regards,

Alfons Diepvens

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