When I posted the open call in October I hoped one or two people would answer. Seven weeks later there are eight of us. Seven live in or near Portland, and we now meet every other Thursday evening in a borrowed room downtown. The eighth, Mareike Schulte, found the post on an astronomy forum and joins from Germany by video call, usually long after midnight her time.
Eight people working on whatever interests them that week turned out to be fun but not very productive, so from this month the work is split into three working groups:
- Historical plates, led by Owen McAllister. This group will look at digitized photographic plates and ask what modern image models can add to them.
- Member images, led by Hana Kowalczyk. This group will build a shared way to calibrate and check the images members take with their own equipment.
- Software, led by Theo Nakashima, with Kenta Morioka looking after storage and compute. Code repositories, models and everything else the other two groups depend on.
Mareike works on professional astronomy projects and has offered to review whatever we publish, in her own time, and to point us to the right tools and data. That is a huge help for a group like ours. Owen has also, very kindly, started taking minutes.
We are still informal. There are no fees, no officers and no rules beyond being decent to each other. If the group keeps growing we will write bylaws in the new year.
A practical note: between meetings, most of our discussion happens in a shared chat server and a shared drive. If you have written to us and not received an invitation, please write again to support@asru.org.