[vsnet-chat 7508] Re: CSS nomenclature

[Andrew Drake]

Hi,

Since this apparently bounced from vsnet I thought
I would try forwarding it.

Regards,
         Andrew
-- 


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:52:57 -0800
From: S. G. Djorgovski <george at astro.caltech.edu>
To: arne <arne at aavso.org>
Cc: Ciro Donalek <donalek at astro.caltech.edu>,
     Matthew Graham <mjg at cacr.caltech.edu>,
     Ashish Mahabal <aam at astro.caltech.edu>, Andrew Drake <ajd at cacr.caltech.edu>,
     Roy Williams <roy at cacr.caltech.edu>,
     George Djorgovski <george at astro.caltech.edu>,
     Francoise Genova <genova at cluster.u-strasbg.fr>, contradixion at safe-mail.net,
     mikesimonsen at aavso.org, variable_star_forum at yahoogroups.com,
     vsnet-alert at yahoogroups.com, vsnet-chat at ooruri.kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: CSS nomenclature

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