BAA deep sky Section meeting 1st March

Just a note to say that the BAA Deep Sky Section will be holding its
annual meeting in conjunction with Cotswolds A/S on Saturday 1st march
at Century Hall, Shurdington, Cheltenham, GL51 4TB


More details at http://britastro.org/baa/content/blogsection/6/129/

Hope to see you there

Owen

On 16 Feb, 11:16, Owen Brazell wrote:
Just a note to say that the BAA Deep Sky Section will be holding its
annual meeting in conjunction with Cotswolds A/S on Saturday 1st march
at Century Hall, Shurdington, Cheltenham, GL51 4TB

More details athttp://britastro.org/baa/content/blogsection/6/129/

Hope to see you there

Owen

Sadly it is too far for me to drive but I hope you have a successful
meeting.

Martin Nicholson
Daventry

On Feb 16, 5:55 pm, ukastronomy
wrote:
On 16Feb, 11:16, Owen Brazell wrote:

Just a note to say that the BAA Deep Sky Section will be holding its
annual meeting in conjunction with Cotswolds A/S on Saturday 1st march
at Century Hall, Shurdington, Cheltenham, GL51 4TB

More details athttp://britastro.org/baa/content/blogsection/6/129/

Hope to see you there

Owen

Sadly it is too far for me to drive but I hope you have a successful
meeting.

Martin Nicholson
Daventry


Over the past seven months many papers have been published in variable
stars. Quite a lot of red variables from NSVS datamining have also
been published.

As VSX is seriously lagged in terms of certain periodicals, it is also
quite possible that if you only check VSX you may not have realised
that some of your discoveries may have already been published in
several possible journals.

Whatever the case of that, it is the standard and classical precept
that priority in science is attributed on the basis of formal
publication, as that is the only concrete evidence for future peoples.

It would therefore be advisable for you to examine all your entries in
VSX and change the discoverer identities to the papers that have
published these stars, as they are the formal record.

Not only will you need to use SIMBAD, which should link to most
journal articles for the star, you will need to examine in full
editions of the OEJV and the PZP and the PZ via the ADS so that the
published article can properly be referenced.

As stated, it will be the case that sometimes the article will have
even preceded your making an entry in VSX, and if you did not do
adequate and wide ranging literature search, you will not have been
aware of this, but it means that those stars will have been discovered
by the papers' authors whichever definition of discovery is used.

ADS will also let you search the half dozen and more professional
papers in astro-ph where many new variables have been published in
mainstream journals which will also be the first official announcement
of those objects.

Hi John

Your views on VSX would be better posted to the AAVSO discussion group
or to the VSX group on Yahoo then all the interested parties would be
free to comment.

Martin Nicholson
Daventry UK

Unfortunately, as can be seen in the records of postings for this
mailing list, you treat any advice or help given that does not agree
with your claims of discovery of new objects of many different kinds
either dismissively or rudely and always arrogantly.

In science precedent and priority in public peer reviewed journals is
the standard means of affirming information.

The GCVS and the WDS are compilation catalogues created under official
International Astronomical Union direction and edict to collect
together data from published papers into one place. Other
publications of catalogues are things like the ESO Planetary Nebula
catalogue, which again consists of compilation work, but also any new
objects within it found by ESO are covered because it itself is
published in a peer reviewed journal. In some rare exceptional cases,
this can be bypassed. The NGC/IC Project is an electronic publication
within the CDS Strasbourg holdings, and contains much work generated
by dedicated amateurs who put a great deal of effort and skill into
solving many mysteries. Although it appears to have not been formally
published, it was placed with the CDS by Harold Corwin, a professional
astronomer who very much encouraged and steered the project, with
decades of reputation in the field of extragalactic astronomy, and
with a past history of steering the well known and professionally
published RC extragalactic catalogues.

Any object currently listed in SIMBAD where the object is linked
bibliographically to a paper is connected to that paper and its
authors. SIMBAD mainly attempts to include peer reviewed or
specifically recognised actual publications.

Your variables are currently residing in an online web database, not a
publication, and a database run by an amateur organisation with no
official sponsorship from the International Astronomical Union. It is
not run by either an academic or scientific institute, but an amateur
nonprofit organisation. Nothing from it has been formally published
under its own identity. Published material may have been added to it,
but such published material is available to all. Submissions to it
are not refereed but are moderated, and it is highly likely that none
of the current moderating staff of this amateur nonacademic
organisation is currently employed or working for any scientific or
academic institute, and if some have such connection, likely not as a
variable star expert. The head of the organisation may be considered
a professional scientist but currently is not employed by an academic
nor scientific institute.

Worse still, this amateur organisation online database is very often
very much out of date, something its developer will often confess to,
due to personal issues. This is fair enough, however it does mean
that checking against this database to see whether a new variable is a
new discovery is not the same as a new variable actually being a new
discovery. Other online amateur lists are more uptodate with respect
to newly published variables in various journals, as are the
traditional professional interfaces, such as SIMBAD, VizieR and even
the ADS. Most of the more frequently publishing journals, both
professional and amateur, are also fully available online nowadays,
for example IBVS, PZP or OEJV.

So, on the one hand objects you may have submitted to it, and checked
within it, are not necessarily as new as is claimed, if no other
checks have been undertaken but those using this online database.

But in general as it is just an amateur database held online and not a
publication, nor peer reviewed by professionals, anyone who publishes
any of these objects elsewhere in a recognised paper will get the
bibliographic linkage in SIMBAD and ADS, automatically too, as such
things are robot script based nowadays.

All these groups have official IAU sanction to do these things, and
peer reviewed professional journals are peer reviewed professional
journals.

There is similarly no reason whatsoever why any professional institute
or organisation should feel the need to examine some list before
publication, least of all a database generated by amateur
organisations, if that list is not published in the formal way. Many
will not even be aware of its existence if it is not linked into the
standard online systems.

Furthermore, even if in some future instance the online database
received IAU approval and sanction, this would not be retroactive.
Entries identified within it and given the database's coding name
would not have been published prior to entries in published papers.
It would also be a compilation catalogue, the amateur organisation
involved has neither the resources nor the competent staff to
officially adjudicate on such matters at a high level. The GCVS and
WDS use peer reviewed sources for similar reasons. They cannot spend
forever double checking every single object, although they do seem to
put some effort into doing this of late for older neglected objects.
The fact that something has managed to be published in a peer reviewed
article is seen as hopefully indicative of validity. Granted much
peer reviewed work nowadays is poorly reviewed, but that's a problem
with the practice, not the principle.

Indeed, even if it became an adequate and professional listing of
objects, the discovery and bibliographic linkages would need to be
changed to the relevant papers in the bibliographic indices, based on
priority for discovery, although studies on works do not have to be
the discovery paper an object was first mentioned in, as long as the
studies provide new and progressed information.

This is how it works in science, not just astronomy. Otherwise anyone
can claim anything without need of proof. Webpages can be edited
without anyone knowing necessarily. Printed journals are printed
journals. It is not that people will necessarily be deceptive, it is
that a published, dated, printed paper will be disseminated amongst
various libraries and institutions, and be available for independent
checking, which leads to a built in secure system.

Future, and even current, scholars who are interested in nomenclature
and history of science, or even simply bibliographists, will follow
the rule of priority.

Even for those of your new variables managing to predate later
publications ironically the main study paper will probably detract
from the discovery paper. And this also means that the current
published version will be better quality than your logged version, as
it will be properly investigated.

In an attempt to ensure you have as many of your objects included as
possible you label most of them as being of GCVS variability type
"L:", which is pretty much the same code as completely unknown. It
means "possibly long period variable, but uncertain". No doubt you
will quote the exact wording the GCVS uses, as you are fond of such
things as if merely quoting things as being worded differently from
what people attest makes a difference even if the underlying meaning
is in fact the same. If you classified objects as semi-regular you
would have to give more evidence, if you claimed them Miras, you would
have to give periods. L: is safe. Any newly found suspect variable
anywhere can safely be classed L: until more information is found.
Many of your objects do have easily found color evidence of being red,
but you do not even use Lb most of the time, or even Lb: (: means
"uncertain").

Therefore the papers already published which contain some of the
variables you have logged at the amateur database, but were researched
and discovered independently, often without knowledge of this database
(it is not known everywhere, other countries, especially those that
are not English native speaking countries, have some form of amateur
astronomy variable star database and new variable stars' lists, often
online, no less valid, even if they are not as sophisticated looking
and some are dismissive of the one in the USA being any different in
context) and further researched by either amateurs or professionals or
a combination, will often contain in the publication a more direct
variability type and even at times an estimation of the period. Not
only do they have priority, they have properly solved the object, and
using the same NSVS data source with no extra time series data.
Instances of this can be seen in PZP, for example.

So, if someone has independently researched and analysed and properly
classified a variable and published it in a standard and peer reviewed
place that is hosted and run by a professional academic institute, why
should they be concerned about what you have added to a list moderated
by fellow amateurs?

Your usual response to such things, as has happened with doubles, is
to whine and complain on various usenet lists and in blogs about how
unfair the professionals are and that they should totally change how
they have done things for decades, usually with no more justification
than this would allow them to accept your work without you having to
meet anyone even remotely halfway by doing things properly like
everyone else has to. You have been making such blogs for years, and
it has not changed in any way how professional trained scientists have
looked at your numerous lists.

You are rude to professionals and amateurs alike, and mostly
interested in being known for finding something new, whether it be
dark clouds, doubles, variables, nebulae, or anything, so that you can
claim to have beaten the professionals, all points and statements and
aims avowed to on your webpages and blogs, and get annoyed when
someone shows something is already listed somewhere else, and often
has been for decades, but you just haven't looked hard enough.

No amount of posting materials to webpages or forwarding lists to
email lists or surreptitiously upping lists and files to yahoo group
file archives (often without notifying the list) will give you
precedent or priority, even if it does establish a date, as none of
this work is peer reviewed and/or formally published.

And no amount of whining and complaining that the professional
astronomical community will not drag itself into some imagined 21st
century different universe so that they can accommodate all the
numerous lists you generate from playing games with online databases,
yet usually including little if any substantive follow up (which
involves work and effort, not just playing with mixing lists searched
from databases via sql queries) and usually not collected together in
a way that they are presentable in a consistent and noncontradictive
way (publication also involves actually effort and work, not least of
which consists of rigorous literature searches and the reading of the
papers found in those searches, and the understanding of them) will
make any difference.

Having been accepted for inclusion in an amateur run online database
by amateur astronomy moderators is no more meaningful than having an
email accepted by moderators of a any public webforum as far as
academia is concerned.

You can up the details to a million lists, make them available on a
thousand webpages, complain that they are being ignored on a hundred
blogs, and yet they will still belong to the person who published them
in the first place, with the proper analysis, even if they had been in
your obscure and hidden lists all along.

And what is most to the point, and what you will never be capable of
understanding, is that in the end none of this matters. What will
matter in the fullness of time is the science involved in the star.
Which again will lead to papers describing the nature and realistic
type of the star being used more than some mere list somewhere, but
again as long as the star is categorised somewhere, no one will care
particularly by whom.

Until your new objects, of whatever kind, are presented in such a way
that someone can manage to get them published in a formal manner, or
until you manage that yourself (and if it is you who wish the credit
you should do it yourself and stop expecting others to do it for you),
then if they get published first by someone else, even if the someone
else doesn't even do any better at it than yourself, then only a small
handful of the objects you delight in saying you have found on your
webpages will actually be identified with you, but instead by the
people who first mentioned them in the public standard arenas.

Inclusion in blogs, amateur databases, amateur mailing lists, usenet
groups and nonstandard obscure web periodicals that are not known of
by the professional community will not make any difference.

These are not my rules, it is not anyone else who is doing this to
you. It is the way things are, and as such it is you that is doing it
to yourself.

Your over a thousand variables may as well not exist, because as far
as the online bibliographic systems and the professional community is
aware, they do not.

Hi John

As I have already said your views on VSX would be better posted to the
AAVSO discussion group or to the VSX group on Yahoo. In that way more
of the people with a particular interest in the points you raise would
read what you have to say.

Martin Nicholson
Daventry UK