REA - COBS

We are pleased to announce that our visual records are shared with Comet Observation Database (COBS). Following the example of other international associations' comets sections, such as BAA Comet Section, ALPO Comet Section and the VdF-Fachgruppe Kometen, the Brazilian Comet Section shared all visual observations of comets available in our database with the COBS - Comet Observation DataBase. COBS was developed in 2010 and is maintained by Crni Vrh Observatory in Slovenia. Its database is somewhat similar to a proposal that the observer Nilton Frota was developing for the REA, where registered observers sent their data via a SQL database. As the comet observations webpages of Brazilian Comet Section are freely available for viewing online, COBS does more than that: it allows to build light curves and collect some statistical information such as know which records are from a country or association. Registration of REA (Brazilian Astronomy Network) was important in this respect since several of our observers already sent their records to the COBS. So, does it means Brazilian Comet Section website will no longer be updated? Far from it! We will continue with the same work. Only now, from time to time, also we sent to COBS. The website is located at URL http://www.cobs.si To get an idea ofREA and Brazil's situation in the international field of visual comet observation, we suggest following this link: http://www.cobs.si/statistics But the work is not yet complete. There are ancient observations that need to be checked and transformed into the appropriate format. In addition to having some observations of comets not registered in COBS.