Time series issues

Its becoming apparent that the large increases we are seeing in observations totals is likely due mainly to the submission of long time series by CCD observers. Now, I am not implying anything is wrong with time series, in fact they are a great and useful feature of automated telescopes and software!

However, these long runs on a single object by a single observer can really screw up the traditional measures and behaviors of our systems here. For example, I had to cancel my Newsflash reports, because there was no method available to exclude all the time series. It results in lengthy multi-page Newsflash reports, which defeats their purpose. You just want a concise view of what your stars are up to, not endless rows of repetitive data.

It also affects the observations counts being submitted to the AID. A long time series is really not worthy of crediting hundreds of observations to a single observer, as would the same number of individual visual observations of different objects would!

What I am suggesting is the need for a way to somehow segregate time series from other individual observations. Maybe flag them as a single "block" or array of data which would be counted the same as a single visual observation, for example. Then, Newsflash would only output one representative observation from that long series, for example, making those reports become useful again. And, the observer totals would return to a more reasonable and realistic level as well.

Hopefully this issue can be addressed in a timely fashion.

Mahalo, Mike LMK