This week’s rather inconspicuous looking image has the image number 100,000 in our internal count. This means it is the one hundred thousand’s image that has been uploaded to our database. We’d like to use this opportunity to thank again all the data contributors and processors for their efforts. Two more papers using your data are in the final stages of being written and three new post-graduate students are due to start working with the data in a few weeks.

Of course we do not yet have actually 100,000 images processed into the database. This number is now just above 91,000, with a further just over 1,000 images waiting to be processed. The ‘missing’ 9,000 images have been deleted for some reason or another. These reason are as follows: 1) images initially uploaded for testing during the development of the database and the processing procedures; 2) images uploaded in error for the wrong targets; 3) images uploaded in error as duplicates; 4) images rejected and deleted due to low image quality; 5) images that had been uploaded but were lost when the database server hard disks failed. From experience, number 2, 3, and 5 dominated the count of the ‘missing’ images.

Over the last few weeks we have seen quite a resurgence of people submitting images. In other words, a large number of people who took part in the past but stopped for various reasons have returned to submitting images. Indeed at some stage last week I checked and 15 different users were responsible for the last 200 uploaded images. This is good to see, and we would like to encourage everyone to keep sending us their data. As case in point, we have found that in order to reliably study the evolution of spots on young stars (the subject of one of the upcoming papers), we need at least 100 photometry data points in at least three filters for each star. While this is much ‘worse’ than the HOYS goal of one image per target per filter per night, it still means data roughly every three nights per field in all filters. While we have that for some regions, we need to maintain this cadence and to improve for the other fields.