Hi all,
In light of Tony's last email I would like to open this very important discussion of defining the filters to be used for automatic tagging of events by OWC to be made available in OW.
Because OWC has all events on a global scale and because OW does filtering based on a distance, the distance from a location or the geographical region will not be part of the tagging criteria/filter.
I will be interested to learn what everyone is using for their own filtering in regards to magnitude, mag drop, duration, but here is my current idea. I see the filter to have three separate components we need to discuss and agree on.
1) Quality: The first component determines the quality of the event and may include stuff like max error bars, min diameter, min rank, min SNR etc. We need to agree on what is worth for high quality events and I think that previous experience from Steve Preston's selection algorithm as well as everyone elses experience from generating Personal Predictions or feeds, will help here.
2) Viability: The second component determines constraints related to min duration, mag drop and integration rate (exposure) to achieve the min SNR defined in the Quality constraint i.e. to obtain meaningful recording. We should be able to determine from past observations what those are and create a table that I can use for applying the filter based on max duration, mag drop and min exposure.
3) Accesibility: The third component will be different for different observers and will laregly depend on the telescope aperture and how dark is their sky. I imagine that there will be different tags for different levels of accesibility. I thought I will base this purely on telescope aperture, for example the tags can be Aperture8, Aperture10, Aperture12, Aperture14, Aperture16, Aperture20, Aperture24 where each number repeserents the aperture in inches and assumes a limiting sky magnutude of 5. Then everyone can pick the tag that applies to them, which is not necessaryly the tag for their aperture as it will also depend on the limiting magnitude for their sky condition. The idea however is that thi sis something easy to understand as a tag ApertureXY would mean that this event will be assesible with a telescpe with aperture of XY inches with limiting magnitude of 5. I may have a smaller telescope and darker sky and will then choose the tag that best applies for what I have assess to.
So the first big question which deserves a good discussion is what Quality of events we want to be automatically tagged. Considering that there are 30 million events in OWC and noone will be interested in all of them, it is important to agree on what constitutes a good quality event for the majority of the users/observers that is worth observing regardless of other factors (such as potential moons, rings, etc scientific interest). Events with more specilised scientific interest will be tagged aditionally and separately as already done for LuckyStar and other campaigns.
Those who want more than just the average recommended events and the active campaigns would be abel to do more specialized searches in the OWC database to satisfy their desires. Not sure exactly how this is going to work yet, but these types of events are outside of the Quality criteria I am trying to get defined here for the global OWC tagging of events.
Also worth mentioning that these global events might be seen as an extension to and a replacement of the current IOTA Occultation events. The idea is that at some point Steve Preston will stop publishing his events and OWC would become the source of those events. IOTA Occultations may still list events but tagging will be done on OWC and predictions will come from OWC as well.
So let me what you think about all this.
Cheers,
Hristo.
