[vsnet-alert 4814] Re: Unnecessary postings? or an Incorrect Empohasis

["William S G Walker" <astroman@voyager.co.nz>]

Greetings,

This topic seems to come up every so often. As a relatively consistent CV
observer I like a place where I can see everything that's happening in the
CV world at a glance. VSNet-Alert is the nearest to this. OK, it comes with
a lot of stuff of no interest to me like faint SNs (I've probably made more
UBV measures of SNs than most but have yet to be personally convinced of
the value of all these faint ones, but that's my idiosyncracy). I can
easily skip these items.

But even so some things are missed like the early stages of the precursor
to the last OY Carinae superoutburst because it was initially on the
obervations net only. We're reaching a stage where the later stages of SOs
are highly overobserved, yet the events in the precursor and the onset of
the SO are very poorly observed. Some of the features of the early stages
of the ordinary outbursts of SU UMa stars have only been observed once or
twice on individual stars. Only CCD monitoring will prove whether they are
universal or occur only on stars of particular types, or with certain
inclinations.

Some might say that this is all visual observing material but having looked
at some of this in detail the same pattern is seen there - heavy
overobserving in the later stages but few measures of the really important
parts. And in some cases the amplitudes are only a few percent.

So I'd sooner plough through many messages than miss one of them which may
lead to  new discovery. There aren't all that many CVs and if the first
detection of any outburst was on VSAlert I would think that a useful
posting. At present there's a heavy emphasis on SOs and it's reminiscent of
the 1970s when a group of people were detecting superhumps on different
CVs. But initially all that this tells us is that they are stars of a
particular subgroup - the SU UMa stars. We seem to discount all the others
as unimportant but this is not necessarily the case.

So rather than fewer notifications I'd like to see every CV outburst on
VSAlert.

Regards,
Stan

And best wishes to Sonja - a well emphasised point about the 'Sirs' - which
was pointed out to me by a different lady!

----------
> From: Taichi Kato <tkato@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
> To: vsnet-alert@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
> Subject: [vsnet-alert 4811] (fwd) Re: Unnecessary postings
> Date: Thursday, May 11, 2000 2:38 AM
> 
> Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 11:19:43 +0200 (SAST)
> From: Sonja Vrielmann <sonja@pinguin.ast.uct.ac.za>
> To: Patrick Schmeer <p.schmeer@mx.uni-saarland.de>
> cc: vsnet-alert@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp, Patrick Schmeer
<extpasc@rz.uni-sb.de>
> 
> Dear Patrick, dear Observers,
> 
> there are some people who do not follow all observations but only the
> alerts, because they are mainly interested in outbursts. Then I find it
ok
> to post all sorts of outbursts in the vsnet-alerts, even not so rare
ones.
> Anyway, where does one draw the line? But I agree that there are
sometimes
> unnecessary postings in the alerts. Follow-up observations or fadings
> after an outburst are certainly not alert worthy.
> 
> It was a good idea to split the vsnet messages to reduce the mail load if
> one wishes to, but I guess, except for maybe the alerts there is no
common
> mailing list and therefore difficult to reach everybody otherwise. Like
> this message rather belongs to vsnet-chat, but is aimed at the whole
vsnet
> community.
> 
> Best regards and apologies for posting this to vsnet-alerts,
> Sonja.
> 
>

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