WebObs search updated and the future of QuickLook

Hello all,

Since we introduced the new WebObs search, you've been able to search for observations by other observers or omit the observer to get all the observations for a specific star or date range. This is a departure from the old WebObs search page that only allowed you to search your own observations. What this means is that the QuickLook program is now redundant--you can get a snapshot of recent observations easily through the WebObs search, and do a lot more besides.

Since it doesn't make sense for us to have two programs that do the same thing, we've decided to remove QuickLook. In that vein, I've just updated WebObs with new functionality to match what's available in QuickLook right now. A full list of the update is below, for those interested.

These new updates are live, but QuickLook hasn't been taken down yet. I don't want people to feel like QL has been replaced by an inferior tool, so I'd like to get people's feedback on the changes to make sure it's still easy to use and has all the features people excpect. If you use QuickLook, please start using the WebObs search instead by going to Data->Webobs and clicking "Search for Observations." You can post feedback here or email me (will@aavso.org [1]) 

Full list of changes to WebObs search:

• Checkboxes to decide which types of observations (Visual, CCD, etc) to show
• Ability to highlight a specific observer
• Magnitude display now includes a link to LCG light curve for that star including the selected observation
• Links to the chart used in an observation where availible 
• A more verbose display of data at the top of the results page--how many observations were found, how many observers involved, the date range, etc.
• A minor usability update: going to a page that's empty will redirect to the last page that has observations, e.g. if your search is split into 30 pages, going to page 31 will redirect to page 30. This fixes an issue where deleting observations would cause people to be redirected to a page that didn't exist and get an error.