[vsnet-chat 7505] Re: CSS nomenclature

[S. G. Djorgovski]

Dear Arne,

thanks for your note.  I take the liberty of cc'ing the relevant  
people and lists on this reply.  Andrew drake, the CRTS survey Co-PI,  
may also want to pitch in.

Dr. Kato is indeed a strange case.  What he has been doing is at the  
very least unprofessional, and it sometimes borders on unethical (or  
crosses that border, e.g., when he cites only himself for our sources  
which he has renamed, and does not cite the original discovery).  He  
has completely rejected our requests to correct things.  I have so far  
refrained from contacting his superiors, but maybe I should take some  
serious action.

Let me first dis-spell some misconceptions:

IAU does not have binding rules, just recommendations for the naming  
conventions.   Furthermore, IAU does not have -any- official  
conventions regarding events (as opposed to sources).  In any case, it  
is a prerogative of discoverers to name things they discovered, both  
by the traditional practice, and perhaps also by the international  
intellectual property law, and deliberate and unauthorized renamings  
are a violation of these, regardless how anyone feels that an "IAU- 
like" name should be.

So we invented a convention which preserves the survey identity and  
the spatiotemporal nature of the events, viz.:

CSSyymmdd:hhmmss*ddmmss, where * stands for + or -, the date is UT  
date of the discovery, and the truncated RA and Dee are in J2000.

(Actually, we introduced the convention with the PQ transients.)

Simbad usage is simply wrong, in omitting the ":" separator between  
the UT date and the RA, and by inserting the superfluous "J" in front  
of the RA.  (This by the way, is an egregious example of the IAU  
bureaucratic mind at work - who the hell needs that J?  What useful  
purpose does it serve?  But that is another rant.)   Simbad has no  
right to to rename our sources/events any more than Kato does.  So I  
am cc'ing Francoise on this note.

Thus, the only proper way to refer to the CRTS discoveries -as  
events- , e.g., for a source discovered on Dec. 25, 2009, at RA = 01  
23 45.67  Dec = +12 34 56.7 (J2000), to make on up, would be:

CSS091225:012345+123456

And IF that event is not associated with a previously identified  
variable source (e.g., some blazar or a known variable star, etc.),  
THEN that is also to be used as the name of the source.

I hope that clears the air.  We make our events public immediately, so  
that the entire community can benefit from them.  The least people can  
do is to respect our wishes in naming our discoveries, and to give the  
credit where it is due.

With best regards,

George Djorgovski, for the CRTS team