*Sky & Telescope Illustration by Casey Reed
Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Affiliates | About Us | Participant Sites
International Year of Astronomy | American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Affiliates | About Us | Participant Sites
International Year of Astronomy | American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Dear Southern Gems Teammates, Well, we finally did it! After many many hours of struggling with formats and little errors needing correcting, we have finally finished the English version of the Tutorial for the Southern Hemisphere. I think it's one we can all be proud of and one that will get used by lots of people. Congratulations to all on the team for your patience and help. I know we have been silent on the team page for a while, but that's because we were trying to fix all the little glitches (Julio, Jonatas, Sebastian, Marcelo, Thilina, and I). Finally, we have the product. Our next step is to get this out there to the people. I will ask Aaron to put it on the website and publicize it. I am hoping that some of you others will get the word out to possible users as well. Alan, I think you have an outlet for this. Thilina, you are great at getting the word out too. Any of you may send this out to whatever group you'd like to and begin using it. I will be putting a blurb about this on Astronomers Without Borders and I will send it to my buddy Ken Frank at NASA Night Sky Network. He may know some places to send it. When people use it, we would like feedback as to whether the tutorial is easy to follow and clear or any other comments that might need to be made. Now that the English version is completed Julio ,and Sebastian will begin translating this into Spanish and Jonatas and Marcello Souze will begin translating into Portuguese. Everyone please check out the tutotial and see what you think. We hope everyone likes it! David, could you put some information on here about Southern Gems stars and VStar. Maybe something that explains how to analyze theses stars using VStar would be good. Congratulations to the whole team! You are a terrific bunch. We will stay together, so don't go away. There may be other things to do with our tutorial besides using it. Cheers, Joan<!--Session data-->
Hi Joan, all A few things (the 3rd point is the main subject of my message): 1. I will certainly send out some VStar related information in the next day or so. 2. The final document looks great! I've been meaning to send an email for a week or so to ask whether help was needed in a particular area. Well done! Presumably there is still scope for errors to be reported if necessary. For example, there's a very minor formatting issue on the "Last Steps..." page with the columns of names. Is it worth considering asking the team as a whole to do a last once-over proof read of the document? 3. Before people can start submitting observations for these stars via Citizen Sky, the page referred to in the document: http://www.citizensky.org/submitdata and this one in particular: http://www.citizensky.org/submitdata/visual will need to be modified so that: a. the "Star Name" list includes the Southern Gems stars, and b. the "Chart ID" text entry box description/Help link prescribes the name of the chart to be used, e.g. "Southern Gems" vs "10star". I suppose b. is optional, but it may be useful to AAVSO to be able to make the distinction. In the absence of this, I've been using the AAVSO WebObs page to submit observations of zet Phe. I'll point AAVSO staff member Sara Beck to this post for her input also. Regards, David
Hi All, I agree completely with David's point about the data submission page and have spoken to the appropriate people about it. I think you will see some changes soon... Great job on the tutorial everyone! -Sara
Hi David, Sorry to be so dense, but I'm not quite clear on what we need to do or what you want on the tutorial about VStar. Can you write up what is needed and tell ua which page of the document it should be on or whether it needs a separate page? If so, where should the page go? Thanks. We have corrected and recorrected so many times, David. I think everyone is getting a bit burned out with corrections, so unless it's something really essential like information about the data, etc. I think small formatting issues might not be a priority. Good to hear from you! I know you are super busy with the other teams. We appreciate your help! Regards, Joan <!--Session data-->
Hi Julio, Joan, all Thanks for the changes. I hope you don't mind, but I've created an Important Resources Southern Gems Wiki page (see Wiki pages box at right above team members area). The first two items I've added to that page are: a link to the latest tutorial, and a link to the observation submission page. If the document is updated again, it can simply be attached to that page, and the link edited to point to it. This also has the advantage of showing a history of changes to the document. Optionally, if the list of attached tutorial versions grows too big (unlikely), attachments can be deleted. Regards, David
David, Thank you so much for creating the Wiki page. As you probably guessed, I don't have a clue how to make a Wiki page, so I'm really grateful to you for taking the initiative. That will be very handy for getting to those documents/places easily without having to hunt through a bunch of posts to find the document. Thanks again! Cheers, Joan<!--Session data-->
No problem Joan. If you want to create another wiki page, see the Create Wiki page link in the Southern Gems box at right. Regards, David
Hello all, It was really nice to see the final product! So much was put into this. The team should be really proud of the amount of work done. Now that we have the final product, this is where I can be more helpful. I kindly request everyone to follow these in order to reach wider audience and get more publicity. It's very important that we create a proper announcement and share it with the pdf, rather than each one of just sending it around. Announcement: Joan, can you please write a small announcement, maximum of three brief paragraphs: 1) Introduction 2) Procedure 3) Spread the word Circulation: Once we have the announcement, everyone else can translate it and use it to circulate with pdf attached among your groups and networks locally. Social Media: Then we can harvest the social networking to spread this more. Most of you are on Facebook, and you can share there. And I manage few networks - http://thilinaheenatigala.blogspot.com/p/social-networks.html which I could use. Websites/Blog: You can put the announcement in your website/blog and I'll try to get this in some of the popular websites and blogs. Cheers! Thilina
Hi Thilina, I will try to work on the announcement for the tutorial this week. Maybe we should wait until the translations are finished to send the word out further? What do you think? Otherwise we will have to do it all over again when they are finished. There will be a translation in Portuguese and in Spanish. Cheers, Joan<!--Session data-->