Registry in RSS

[Alasdair Allan]

> One thing that I've thought would potentially be very powerful would  
> be for observatories to tweet events of the form:
>  "It's now YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS and I'm taking an image at RA,Dec  
> with CameraX"
> One could do this with regular VOEvents (and I've mentioned it in  
> that context), but my sense is that it's much culturally attuned to  
> how tweeting is done generally.
>
> If there were a significant density of tweets of this form,  
> astronomers could easily choose to make simultaneous observations   
> and develop spontaneous collaborations.  They could mine also mine  
> archived tweets to find if there was data that might be useful a  
> given project.

The .Astronomy (http://dotastronomy.com) crowd is already doing this  
sort of thing. For example see the list of feeds generated by Stuart  
Lowe for Jodrell Bank telescopes, http://twitter.com/jodrellbank/telescopes 
  which is the first link I have to hand...

There are others, amoungst other things I push all the event messages  
going through my broker to Twitter (see http://twitter.com/estar_project) 
  although that isn't really what we're talking about here, however  
when one of my telescopes is following up on a GRB or a microlensing  
position you'll get the sort of slew message you're talking about above.

At somewhat of a tangent there is Tweprints, see http://twitter.com/tweprints 
  and http://www.orbitingfrog.com/arxiv/ for arXiv preprints on Twitter.

Cheers,
Al.