[BAA Comets] New BAA comet image archive

[Nick James]

Morning all,

Denis Buczynski and I have been working on a new comet image archive for 
the section. This replaces the old picture gallery that was withdrawn 
when the BAA changed to its new website. This is currently a work in 
progress but it is now available here:

http://www.britastro.org/cometobs/

The basic links in the database are generated automatically from the 
observation filename which must be of the form:

object_date_observer.jpg

or

object_date_time_observer.jpg

Additional information for each image comes from a text file with the 
same name but the extension *txt.

In the filename the individual fields are:

- object is the object's name (without any preceeding letter), i.e. 27p 
or 2013v2.

- date is the date in the form YYYYMMDD, i.e. 20140317

- time is the time in the form HHMM or HHMMSS.

- observer is an observer code. We will allocate these but for now, if 
you can find an image of yours in the database and it has a full name in 
the "Observer" field use that. If not, contact cometobs at britastro.org to 
be allocated a code.

There are lots of files in the archive that don't conform to this and we 
are currently working to clean these up but this will take some time.

Please continue to submit your images to cometobs at britastro.org but 
please try to use the filenaming format above. Anything else adds 
considerably to the workload of the database administrator (Denis 
Buczynski) and he has more than enough to do observing from probably the 
best site in the UK.

Nick.