[Chaos-l] Astro Twitter?

[Robert Nielsen]

Everyone,

I had a thought this morning ... spurred on by Alice's mention last 
night of the two "Jovian Moon Extravaganza" nights coming up (August 
26th and September 2-3).   Since these happen on a Wednesday night, I 
probably couldn't travel to a really dark site to view them.  And in 
fact, viewing Jupiter from your backyard is completely possible 
(assuming you don't have trees or buildings blocking the way).   But if 
I observed in my backyard, I would lose the camaraderie of observing 
with other folks.  So ...

I work in the social networking arena, within IBM, and I've always 
viewed Twitter as meaningless.   I mean, who sits there and waits for a 
new message on some inane subject to appear on their computer.   But 
then I got thinking and could see how Twitter could be useful to 
"communicate" during an astronomical event, such as the Jovian moon 
transits coming up.   You would need to be "connected" somehow to 
Twitter (I don't have a cell phone that would pull it off, so I would 
need to be near an Internet connection), but I can do that at home.   
But I can almost think it would be fun to be viewing the occultations 
and transits and communicating with you folks in realtime ... or even 
communicating with other astronomers across the world!

And yes, they do this sort of thing.   If you get on Twitter and look 
for "io transit" ... there were people tweeting about a transit last 
night.   There was also a "channel" called #meteorwatch related to the 
Perseid meteor shower.

Anyone want to try this 8/26 or 9/2?

Robert