[TASS] Mari IV Data Processing Progress Report

[Glenn Gombert <gleng@INFINET.COM>]

Hello Mark Data IV Fan's;

    I have just finished the basic conversion necessary for the Linux
version of the "Star" program to process Tom's Mark III images. I have
uploaded to Michael's ftp site two star-lists for the images:

                            H3R1399.725
                            H4R1399.725

    These two images were flat-fielded and dark-frame subtracted using
the dark & flat frames that Tom sent out on his last CD-ROM's.     The
two images were processed into star -lists:

                             BH3R1399.725   - 18,000 stars
                             BH4R1399.725   -  21,600 stars!!

    These images take about 4-5 minutes each to process on a PII-450 Mhz
machine at work with 256 meg of ram. These start-lists themselves are
about 3 megabytes each in size!! I think that once the Mark IV cameras
start producing data that we are going to find ourselves looking down a
"Niagara Falls if data!

    Also it is going to take a _long_ time on a "slow" computer (or a
very fast machine) to keep up with the night-to-night accumulation and
processing of all the data that is going to be generated from just one
Mark IV site. With the volume of data that is going to be generated I
doubt that the current database architecture is going to be up to the
task. (Something for Chris and Michael to start worrying about)....

    I have had several requests from Chris and Herb for the code and
make file for the Mark III processing program, I will  post this in the
next week or two when I have had a chance to clean several programs up a
little....

More Later,
Glenn G.