Re: Data Taking Rate

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

I think shorter files have no effect because this is a drift scan
instrument.  The quality of the data is what it is.   The data I mention is
what survives Mike's cuts.  These are not very strict.  A much tighter cut
would throw away about another half of the data.  

What could be done (I think) is to compute over smaller areas.  I notice
that for my data there is a lot of "banding" until 1 AM or so.  After that
the data gets better.  Nothing much I can do about all the lights here in
the burbs.   From my not too analytic view of what I see going by on the
processing screen, a n area for computation of 1/2 degree square or so
would be needed to take out most of the "banding".   This is probably too
small to have enough reference stars.  

Possibly over time, we can take all our measurements and produce more
accurate mean photometry.  This will allow all the stars in our band to be
"reference" stars.  Then we can use smaller areas and take out more of the
"banding".  OK, this has lots of pitfalls.  One, it assumes that are
measurements are randomly distributed about the mean.  Not obvious to me
that we can count on this.

OK, I will stick to the electronic hardware where I sort of know what I am
doing.  This is all going well.  Today I will try to get the ADCs for the
camera heads working.  Should take a week or so, then I will be ready to go
out for production boards.   I charge ahead.  If I were to wait to do it
"right" I would never do anything.

Tom 

At 03:52 PM 5/2/98 +0000, you wrote:
>I have been thinking of a way to maximumize the amount of good data on
>non-
>perfect nights.  One easy thing would be to use shorter files.  If the
>files
>where half is long as then maybe a larger fraction of be uncontaminated
>by
>clouds.  We could also make the frames much larger or assemble them into
>one
>long strip then "slice out" the good parts.
>
>This is not really a pressing issue as our current problem is not lack
>of
>data.
>
>-- 
>   --Chris Albertson             home: chrisja@jps.net        
>     Redondo Beach, California   work: chris@topdog.logicon.com
>
>