A Curious Article in Mercury

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

As a member of PASP I get the Mercury (v31 n4).  I seldom read it although 
it is a very fine magazine and has very good general articles.  Because I 
was back from my trip and not trying to do much of anything I read it.  I 
just happened to look at the front of the magazine where they were listing 
the ASP awards.  There was Bohden Paczynski getting their most prestigious 
award, the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal.  So I read the write up.

Near the end was a whole paragraph about tass.  I could not believe 
it!  Here is one of the more famous astronomers of the day getting an award 
and somehow tass is mentioned.

I quote:

      "In recent years, Paczynski has advised amateur astronomers who
organized The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS).  TASS is an informal
group of mostly amateur astronomers who build and operated CCD
cameras to s8urvey the night sky for transient events such as novae
and variable stars.  TASS has been taking data since 1998."

This is right in there with his other achievements such as theories of 
interacting binary stars, cataclysmic variables, using gravitational 
microlensing to search for dark matter and his concept that gamma ray 
bursts must occur at cosmological distances.

How in the world did we get mixed in with all these great achievements!

Bohden has been a great help to me, and has been very encouraging.  So I 
very much appreciate his support.  But the last thing I expected was to see 
a mention in his award write up.

Well, I just looked at the PASP write up at 
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/Paczynski/index.html
which is different from that in Mercury.  I suspect that Bohden intended to 
reference ASAS which is the survey that he supports directly and whoever 
wrote up the Mercury article got TASS mixed up with ASAS.  Still, they got 
the reference right, so someone at PASP knows about TASS.

I am amused.

Tom Droege