[vsnet-chat 4775] 160,000+ measurements of WZ Sge a record?

[Stupendous Man <richmond@a188-l009.rit.edu>]

  Many people have been contributing measurements of WZ Sge to 
the VSNET effort over the past month.  From one of Kato-san's
messages (sent Aug 27), I see that over 160,000 data have been
reported in a little more than one month.  

  Is this some sort of record for astronomical measurements 
of a single object?  I can't think of any other object which
has been scrutized so intensely by so many people in such
a short time, but I've been working on CVs for only a short time.
Are there other examples of such intense observation?  I wonder
if SN 1987A is a possible contender -- though I doubt that 
people measured it several times a minute for nights on end.

  Perhaps we fall short of one of the campaigns of the Whole Earth Telescope
on a white dwarf?  Or one of the searches for stellar oscillations
by Gilliland and his colleagues?  Maybe radio astronomers studying
the rotation of millisecond pulsars leave us in the dust ...
Does anyone know?

  When I told one of my colleagues here at RIT about the global
effort over the past month, he suggested that it might make a good
press release.  Now, I really, really dislike the number of press
releases in astronomy these days (especially those stupid "hook"
sentences at the very beginning), and their endless claims of 
"first" and "best" and "groundbreaking discovery".  But if it turns
out that the entire VSNET team has, say, beaten the old record
by a factor of 3 or 4, I wonder if a joint press release from
all contributing institutions and individuals would make sense?

                                         Michael Richmond

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