Another Stellar Volunteer

In December 2010, the question was asked on aavso-photometry why the Landolt standard stars were not included in VSP. I explained what it would take to get this done and answered that the reason it hadn't been done yet was because it wasn't a staff priority at the moment, but if a volunteer were willing to do some of the heavy lifting I would help get the data into VSP.

My response ended with, "I guess the other way to answer your question is- because you haven't done it yet!"

Many times when I suggest that something would be a good job for a team of volunteers or an interested individual to tackle, that is the last I hear of it again for a long time. After a week or so I assumed that was what would happen to this request.
 
Fortunately for all of us, I was wrong.
 
 
In February 2011, I got an email from the man who asked the question, Terry Bohlsen, saying he was planning to do this project, and he had a couple questions. Shortly after answering his questions I received another email from him with all the Southern UBVRI Landolt fields, formatted and ready to load into VSD, the database containing all the comps and variables plotted by VSP.
 
Terry is a man of action. Not long after these fields were entered into the DB, Terry began sending me files of Landolt's 2009 revised UBVRI Equatorial Standards. Now we have about half of those loaded into the database, hours 0-12.
 
I've put together a web page listing all the fields that are now available in VSP, along with the center coordinates of these regions so you can plot them in the chart plotter. I'll update the page as the project progresses.
 
This is another excellent example of a volunteer driven project that would either take forever or not get done at all if the staff were required to do the leg work. I would personally like to express my sincere gratitude to Terry Bohlsen for making this possible. 
 
Mike Simonsen
Membership Director/Development Officer