160,000+ measurements of WZ Sge a record?

Many people have been contributing measurements of WZ Sge to the VSNET effort over the past month. From one of Kato-san's messages (sent Aug 27), I see that over 160,000 data have been reported in a little more than one month.

Is this some sort of record for astronomical measurements of a single object? I can't think of any other object which has been scrutized so intensely by so many people in such a short time, but I've been working on CVs for only a short time. Are there other examples of such intense observation? I wonder if SN 1987A is a possible contender -- though I doubt that people measured it several times a minute for nights on end.

Perhaps we fall short of one of the campaigns of the Whole Earth Telescope on a white dwarf? Or one of the searches for stellar oscillations by Gilliland and his colleagues? Maybe radio astronomers studying the rotation of millisecond pulsars leave us in the dust ...

Does anyone know?

When I told one of my colleagues here at RIT about the global effort over the past month, he suggested that it might make a good press release. Now, I really, really dislike the number of press releases in astronomy these days (especially those stupid "hook" sentences at the very beginning), and their endless claims of "first" and "best" and "groundbreaking discovery". But if it turns out that the entire VSNET team has, say, beaten the old record by a factor of 3 or 4, I wonder if a joint press release from all contributing institutions and individuals would make sense?

Michael Richmond

Submitted by Brian Fraser