Fri, 11/30/2012 - 23:45
On 19 November 2012 I submitted a proposal for the BSM telescope. I have not heard any reply. Was recieved, rejected or it is in process or what. The observations need to begin soon. How can I find out the status of my proposal?
Jeff (HPO)
Hopkins Phoenix Observatory
Hi Jeff,
Your post came in after business hours here, and the appropriate people to query won't be around until Monday. I'll check at that time.
Arne
Hi Arne,
What is the status of my delta Orionis proposal? The campaign starts in just a few days.
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Your proposal has been under discussion by the TAC. Other than whatever decision they make, there are some logistical problems with your proposal. First, only BSM-South is currently operational, and that will have only a few nights during the campaign period due to its usual weather pattern. Second, this star is right at the edge of the bright limit for BSM, and the desired comparison star is too bright and will be saturated. Getting a time series will be very difficult, as many images per filter have to be taken in order to beat down the scintillation with the short exposures that would be required.
There are a couple of possible alternatives, such as temporarily using a neutral density filter in front of BSM, but my personal feeling is that this target is far better suited to PEP or DSLR photometry. Are you going to be observing it from HPO?
Arne
Hi Arne,
Thanks for your reply. I was worried that might be the case. I did not see any information on what range the Bright Star System could image.
As for single channel work, I have given my photon counting system awa. Even then the stars would be on the edge of saturation for it. Ideally an SSP-3 with BVRI filters would work well. I have an SSP-4 and may do some JH band work on the stars, but I do not have access to an SSP-3. If you know of anyone who has one and is interested on doing BVRI photometry on the system please let me know.
I am sending this correspondence to Dr. Noel Richardson to keep him informed on the status. So far it looks like noone will be doing any photometry for this Campaign, sve any JH band work I do.
The DSLR photometry for the V band is a possibility, but I don’t know anyone who is interested. Perhaps a note to that forum would help. I will do that.
BTW, thanks for the AZ Cas data. Wayne Westlake and I are working on it. That is a big project in itself, plus I am doing spectroscopy of delta and epsilon Orionis so I have been very busy.
Have a Happy Holiday season and I am most interested in any other ideas.
Jeff (197283)
Hopkins Phoenix Observatory
I would like for my proposals to be removed from the Queue. SN2013df is now below detection threshold. My other proposal is obsolete as well and should be removed. Is this the best place to send communications to managers of AAVSONet or should I just send messages via comments on the proposal list? I am looking forward to using AAVSONet in the future.
Hi Andy,
Don't worry - the SNe will be removed from your queue. It may take a day or two. This forum is fine to ask questions like that.
Arne
Have heard these kinds of comments before, not to mention my own AAVSONet proposal which didn't get too far :(
Seems to me, it really comes down to: Too many people, too many proposals, too many constraints vs. not enough operational telescopes in necessary locations... Just like in the cyber world, this analogous situation results in a "resource deadlock" and "denial of service" !
So, thats why I basically stick to my own telescopes on my own time :))
Mike LMK
Andy, your target has been deleted. It was in two queues - SRO and TMO61. We could probably continue to image SN2013df from TMO as that site is a bigger telescope and has better seeing, but it would take long exposures and psf-fitting on your part to properly measure the faint supernova. Deleting the project is the simple solution.
Mike, I disagree with you. The reason your proposal was not accepted is that you are not a member of the AAVSO. AAVSOnet is a membership benefit. On occasion, we will take a limited number of images for a non-member, especially a professional, but rarely will that be monitoring activity. I agree that using your own local telescope will always give you all of the available observing time, but some people don't live in Hawaii, and others are either dealing with targets requiring CCD observations or want to learn how to do CCD observations.
That said, the telescopes are not perfect. We're getting much closer to a smoothly running network, but with limited funding and donated telescopes, they don't always keep running. You will find this with other robotic telescope networks as well. There are many success stories with AAVSOnet; people with problems are the ones that you hear about.
For those proposing, the most difficult proposal to accept is the one requiring time series from one of the larger telescopes over multiple nights. The easiest proposal to accept is the one that utilizes the "realm of the galaxies" time. For northern hemisphere observers, that is the patch of sky between about 8 hours and 16 hours of RA, where there are few variable stars. I don't like telescopes sitting idle, so the more targets that we can get in sparse regions, the better.
Arne
Arne, thanks for clarifying why my proposal wasn't accepted. My prior post probably should have made some more concrete recommendations to help AAVSONet, beyond the obvious of adding more telescopes or using one's own personal equipment.
Given the difficulties you mention of getting sufficient telescopes in good locations up and running reliably on one hand, and the strong demand from users for proposals to be acted upon in a timely fashion on the other hand, I can offer a suggestion that may help in the interim.
A colleague of mine at the Univ. of Hawaii, an EE/CS professor, has developed a very effective methodology/algorithm/computing engine called Constrained Resource Planning (CRP). It won an innovation award from Byte Magazine, by providing optimal solutions to many complex planning and scheduling problems. Though no algorithm can guarantee optimal solutions to such "NP" problems, CRP has proven to be a robust, efficient methodology that works successfully in linear time.
Here is a link to a description of CRP http://www-ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~uhlips/CRP/CRP-PAPR.pdf
It provides an overview of the methodology, and lists many actual resource management examples which have been solved and published. I notice one of them is actually about telescope steering, pretty close to the real problems that AAVSONet may face. I am sure Dr. Yun would be willing to help the TAC team apply CRP to the specifics of its planning and operations, even taking into account the reliability and capability factors of each telescope, weather factors at each location, etc. From what I understand, CRP can handle quite complex systems, as long as they can be defined in a concrete fashion to enable a solution via a software app.
Hope this helps!
Mike LMK