WOW What A Bow!!!

I have just caught up with the subsequent posts following the one Conor made (imaged in my post above).

Apologies if it appears like I am pouring more petrol onto this imaginary fire some people think I am stoking.

Seanie i would genuinely love to see your astronomical observations and sketches spanning your observing career and i mean that in a sincere manner and if you have the kettle on for a brew then all the better - sure i will bring down a jar of milk

As for the in your face stuff i have to be frank with you. Any observations i post here and elsewere are for the simple reason that i love observing and i like to share my observations/images (good and bad) with everyone else on these forums. It has nothing to do with ego as my own log books contain twice as much info as seen on the forums...i just like to share these to engage in conversation about observing and seek advice and tips on various subjects from the wealth of talent within the IFAS. I admit i am very active on various forums but i probably suffer from repetitive compulsive disorder and cant help it lol so dont think i am rubbing your nose or anybody else's in the dirt...i always believe that observations are not observations unless they are recorded and shared with others and besides it keeps the forums active and if it encourages anyone else in the process then all the better.

Its a beauiful clear night tonight and i look forward to night fall...the 16" is cooling down now as we speak ..clear skies!

THis must be the longest post ever on rainbows... !

I don't think Seanie has expressed anything different from what he has expressed before. He has a right to do that - in the same way Conor and Martin have a right to express theirs. I don't think personal attacks are useful and in all honesty, I don't think anyone means anyone else any harm. I understand that MArtin and COnor have held off on daily posts but I would have to question why post three images of the same rainbow? If the rainbow itself is unusual, fair enough. But three images? Perhaps a better method might be one image with a couple of links to another site (it does become a little tedious to scroll down three images...).

I think that everyone should have the right to post whatever images they want (astronomical content of course) but I think we do need to be mindful of reader fatigue. It would be a shame if a point was reached were people were so tired of sun dogs, haloes etc and then switch off - only to miss the picture of a lifetime. Now that would be a shame for both Martin and Conor and the rest of us.

However, it seems a solution is at hand where atmospherics afficianados can post away and those who want to can go take a peek.

I hope we can all kiss and make up though - Seanie, Martin and Conor - you are three regular and respected posters who have contributed significantly to the knowledge of the rest of us. Please continue to hold your opinions and voice them from time-to-time, but in the nicest possible way. It would a shame for the rest of us if you had a serious falling out - whatever the reason.

Sorry if I sound like your mum.... But my mum was always right. If we told her she wasn't, we'd get a slap...

Dave

I wrote this inresponse to an earlier post and by the time I pushed submit there were a bunch of other posts in the line. I'm not even going to bother.
A blog is an idea but in the end it is suffers from the same weakness as board-mail. It's not really a good strucure for saving and organizing data. If you want to gather up reports - which is what seems to be needed here, a structured reporting/logging system, then you need online forms that can be filled out and saved, all the records indexed and organized - it's a database issue.
You can blog and pod and post all you like but its a growing pile of random noise. Right now there are 27,833 posts on this board, where will we be in 10 years?? 100,000 posts 200,000 posts?. A googleplex of unstructured data - very usefull. If IFAS and whomever is driving this thing want to achieve something then you need to think about the long term, about putting other useful "products" out there.

JMP

Dave the field of view of my camera is very small which is why i take a number of images to capture and express the full size range of haloes and rainbows etc. Some of them are zoomed in on certain points of the phenomena to show foreground objects etc for contrast and comparison..thats my reason for doing this. I will try to tone it down abit though.

I wrote this inresponse to an earlier post and by the time I pushed submit there were a bunch of other posts in the line. I'm not even going to bother.
A blog is an idea but in the end it is suffers from the same weakness as board-mail. It's not really a good strucure for saving and organizing data. If you want to gather up reports - which is what seems to be needed here, a structured reporting/logging system, then you need online forms that can be filled out and saved, all the records indexed and organized - it's a database issue.
You can blog and pod and post all you like but its a growing pile of random noise. Right now there are 27,833 posts on this board, where will we be in 10 years?? 100,000 posts 200,000 posts?. A googleplex of unstructured data - very usefull. If IFAS and whomever is driving this thing want to achieve something then you need to think about the long term, about putting other useful "products" out there.

JMP

I agree 100% but a blog with tagged meta data is as useful as a DB.

A structured observing reporting thingy has been something I've envisaged for this site from day one. It was in my initial pitch to the IFAS committee all those years ago. Were we to inhabit an ideal world it would have been done years ago. Thing is we don't and for reasons beyond my control I just haven't had the amount of time I'd wanted or expected to put into this place.

I had hoped that things would speed up when I stepped aside as Webmaster but I think reality is bitting back again. Simple fact is we are a community of amateurs who all have a life outside of astronomy that demands a lot of time and of all the people in this sizable community there is saddly only a very small percentage who have both the time and the skills needed to put great ideas like this into practice.

Blogs are achievable now, more advanced systems aren't, hence my proposing blogs.

Bart.