Welcome to the 300th light curve of the week post!!!!! 🙂

That is now almost 6 years of weekly posts. We started that feature on January 7th, 2019, and the first post read:

Lightcurve of the week #1: Happy New Year everyone. Since we now have quite a lot of data, we thought to try to post each week one of the light curves from the database to show the variety of objects we are investigating. Our first object is the variable V2492Cyg, which is one of the most unusual objects in all of our fields. The strong variations are most likely caused by changes in the line of sight extinction and changes in the mass accretion rate.

These posts now include images and even occasional write-ups by our participants (get in touch if you’d like to contribute). But, as always, they would not be possible without the data gathered for the projects by all our observers. Thank you very much! There are now almost 120 people from 18 different countries (as far as we know) who have contributed data. In total there are now over 120,000 images in which we have done in excess of 420 million brightness measurements.

I was going through some old photos the other day and found an image taken on April 17th, 2017, of the Whiteboard in my office. It shows our first initial ideas about the HOYS database, which is now online since October that year. There is a little ‘Gem’ in that image, where we try to estimate storage space (and cost), using 1200 images submitted per year. Note that between starting HOYS in late 2014 and the time the image was taken, we only had gathered about 2000 images. We are currently receiving in excess of 20,000 images per year, i.e. about 20 times our original estimate.

As you know, a large fraction of our data is still not easily accessible, after our had disk failure two years ago. The data are secure, but will need to be incorporated back into the database. Due to the large volume of data, the structure of the tables will be improved, and the second image above shows the anticipated new database structure. Hopefully it won’t take to post number 400 until all the data has been ingested back into the full database. ….