Promised Publicity Blurb

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

Michael and all,

I promised to write up something to be used for publicity.  You can all
giggle if you want to, or you can correct, embelish, and improve the
following:

Tom Droege

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THE AMATEUR SKY SURVEY

It is a joy for the workers on The Amateur Sky Survey (tass) to leave their
Dilbertian world of cubicals, somnolent safety lectures, and meaningless
meetings.  They commute home and enter the rational world of tass.

Tass has never had a meeting.  It would be hard to do so as tass has no
employees or members.  Tass also has no non-members.  All who want to work
are welcome.  Tass has no budget or time sheets, no schedule or required
reports.  There are also no pay checks, but there is meaningful work to do.
 If someone does something, he is free to report it.  The tass worker
usually does this by sending a mail message to the listserv, which sends it
out to everyone who wishes to subscribe. 

Tass is attempting nothing less than a continuous survey of the whole sky.
Eventually this will lead to the detection of comets and earth coliding
asteroids and some of the other things that make good "B" movies.
Meanwhile, learning how to do this generates "bread and butter" science.
For a start tass will produce a large catalog of variable stars.   

This is a monster job.  Consider that someone leaves a new edition of the
Chicago phone book on your doorstep each morning.  Your job is to find all
the changes from yesterday.  Your goal is to somehow analyze all the
changes you have found so that you can detect newly threatening phschotic
commuters.  These are the ones that might kill you from "road rage" when
their commuting path crosses yours.  This illustration really understates
the size of the problem.  

To get this whole process started, Tom Droege has built a number (22) of
inexpensive CCD cameras and has distributed them to interested workers that
he got to know through correspondence on the internet.  There is now a
network of workers.  Some of these have cameras, some work on the data with
their computers, and some just have interest in the process.  Here is what
might be happening on any one day:

Dr. Nick Beser, a xxx at yyyy finishes dinner.  The evening news says the
sky will be clear.  Nick goes to his den and turns on the computer.  By an
internet message he opens the covers of the tass telescope on the roof or
the xxxx building, turns on the cooling water, and starts the program.  The
camera now starts measuring thousands of stars and stores the measurements
on disk for later analysis.

Tom Droege of Batavia, IL has a different concept of automation.  It is
dusk, and the sky looks clear.  "Jennifer will you go out and uncover the
telescope while I go down in the basement and start the computer and the
cooling pump?"  But the process is much the same and the end result is the
same.  Thousands of measurements are left on the hard disk of tass computers.

After accumulating measurements, tass workers process the data and produce
much condensed lists of star measurements.  These are stored at some
convenient spot on the internet.  Often at the computer of Dr. Michael
Richmond at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  

Dr. Richmond checks these lists, and processes them into a huge data base
on his computer.  This data bas is open to all.  You can go there now by
using a web browser and going to:
http://www.tass-survey.org   .  Go to the technical area, select yyyyy and
follow the instructions.  You can pick out a small area of the sky and get
back a list of all the stars that tass has measured there.  Some have been
measured over 100 times.  You can then ask for a plot of the measurements,
and see how the particular star you have selected has varied over time. 

Dr. Arne Hendesn of xxxxx is might be pouring over the data.  Why does is
the data collected Glenn Gombert of Dayton, Ohio brighter in the green
filter than data taken by Dr. Mike Gutzwiller in Cincinnati, Ohio?  What
can be wrong with the calibration process? 

This is a whole new way of doing science.  It is also risky.  If you go to
the data base today, it will mostly look like junk.  One might mistakenly
assume that it is junk.  But this is a scientific work in progress.  We are
working on making all the scientific corrections that the data needs to
make it meaningful.  Meanwhile, it is there to see with all it's warts, a
very unusual situation in science.  

The mail list is a continuous active debate over how to do this work.
While dominated by a dozen or so active workers, a tough problem might
bring out real experts from the several hundred lurkers.  Here is an actual
quote from a few days ago about how a problem got fixed. Someone complained
that the data base mentioned above was not working.  This produced the
following message (code removed to protect women and children and others of
tender dispositions):

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Stupendous Man (Rochester NY) wrote:
> 
> I can't check myself, because the only Unix box with Postgres installed
> is my own :-( ... but if you could check for me, we could see if
> the remote access is now possible.

It works now.  Here is a what I did, cut and pasted from my screen.
As you can see I used hostname = www.tass-survey.org, 
database name = mergedb, and username = guest.  I let the port
number default to 5432.

(There follows a dozen or so lines of code - all done over the internet,
and as near as I can tell without the owner of the computer it was done on
even knowing that something was being worked on.)

Chris Albertson  (Renando Beach CA)

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