Back to Work

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Looks like I am settled down from the trip west and am back to work.  Just 
checked out a couple of boards and a couple of cameras.  There is lots to 
do.  Mostly I need to clean up this pig sty.

I left a 200 MHz K6 with Arne as it seemed to be the only computer that 
would work at the time.  Arne has since switched memory cards and has the 
system working with his 500 MHz Dell?  This left me a computer short so I 
went out an bought a new one.  Any excuse.  ;^)

This is a 500 MHz K6 for $420.  It includes on board display driver, 
serial, parallel, network card, modem, and 2 USB ports.  There is a 15 GB 
disk and a floppy.  64 MByte memory.  It has one ISA slot.  I suppose that 
someone will write that there are better deals out there.  But this is 
really just to mention that the cheapest  possible computer will run a Mark 
IV just fine.

But it has not done it yet.  That will be the project for this 
afternoon.  To hook that computer up to TOM and get it back in 
operation.  I hope to take a bunch of data with TOM while I am doing 
production things.  I think I will just sit at 0 degrees declination and 
take frames as often as I can.  The plan is to follow the sky for 12 
minutes or so and take as many exposures as I can.  Then restore the RA 
position and start all over again with about 100 second exposures.  This 
should get lots of Landolt stars, and many repeats after several 
nights.  Arne you might comment.

I think this is my time for good sky, so I better take advantage of it.

I hope to work with Mike to process this data.  What say Mike?  In any case 
I will write it on CD ROM until the time that it is possible to process it.

Meanwhile I will run the production line.

Tom Droege