[Chaos-l] observing reports website

[Michael Hrivnak]

I'd like to know how each of you keeps records of observing sessions.
Do you take written notes?  Do you type something up later?  Do you
keep records in some astronomy software?  How do you use them later?

For example, I generally scribble notes in a notebook and then
sometimes (not often enough) convert them into a blog post at
http://michaelsastronomy.blogspot.com/.  Sometimes I go back to see
what I observed in years past during the same season to look for
objects I'd like to see again, and to remind myself of which ones
really weren't worth the hunt.

The reason I ask is that I wonder if a simple website could be very
useful to a lot of people.  Here is what I have in mind:

- You log into an account on this site, and you see a history of your
observing sessions.  Click on a session, and you can see entries for
each object, and all the other info you might expect from an observing
report (location, weather condition, other participants, equipment,
etc).

- You can create a new observing session.  Choose from a list of
observing sites, or add a new one.  The system has the usual
astronomical catalogs ready to go, so as you start typing "NCG 6...",
it's auto-completing.  The website displays the equipment you own, and
you use checkboxes to select what you used for this observation.  I
might check "Starmaster 18 f/4.5" and "Nagler 17".

- You can browse other people's observations.  Search for people by
name, search for observations of a specific object, search for
observations from a specific location, or observations made with
specific equipment.

- The system knows about many or all of the Astronomical League's
observing clubs and can help you track progress toward one of them.
It might even alert you that "Hey, maybe you haven't noticed, but
you're 60% of the way done with the XYZ Club requirements."

This all came up because I'm thinking of doing the Messier club.
Keeping my logs in a word processing document seems clumsy, and I
think I could whip up a website with most of the above features
without a ton of effort.  And if I'm going to go through all of the
effort to make these observations and log them, it would be nice to
log them in a way that would be useful in the future.

Thoughts?  What would you find useful, and what would it take to get
you interested in using such a site?

Interested in helping?  Let's talk.

Thanks,
Michael