Re: Work to Do (was: Lots of Data)

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I think there is another possibility.  Besides the individuals with 
cameras, the group should try to support a software analysis effort of 
people without cameras.  Some of you are interested but are at bad 
locations, or don't want the bother of operating a system.  Giving away 
cameras is just my trick to get the software written.  You don't have to 
have the bother of a electronic/mechanical monster to do some good work and 
have some fun.

I will support anyone who wants to work on data with data disks.  I don't 
think we have to create a big data base with all the data available on line 
to do some good work.

In simple terms we need to:

1) Process the data to star lists.
2) Merge the lists.

We have done this with Mark III data, so I know it is possible to do it 
with Mark IV data.

Once we have a merged list, a lot of good science can be done with it 
without putting it in a data base.  Lets say a northern hemisphere list of 
2 million (pretty bright)  stars with 50 observations in 2 filters.  Lets 
say 80 bytes per observation.  This is 28 CD ROMs.  This is only 16 GB and 
fits on a not very expensive disk.  Given such a nice block of data, I can 
think of lots of things to do with it.  Soon it would be down to one CD 
with probable variable stars on it.  Now one can have some fun.

I repeat my offer to send Data disk 16 to anyone who wants to work on software.

I am tempted to take a couple of years off the hardware production and 
start reducing data.  It would take me about that long to get up to speed, 
but I know I could do it.  One thing I am passionate about is getting data 
shoved through the pipeline.  I am not building cameras to take pretty 
pictures as we lose on that account.  We don't really have any competition, 
but we will eventually.  At the moment those that might compete, like ROTSE 
are not putting filters on their systems.

Tom Droege

At 04:06 PM 10/20/00 -0400, you wrote:
>We've been down this road before with the Mark III and Tom is right, there
>is a strong tendency for us programmer types to want to do it all ourselves.
>That's the way it started with the Mark III with at least three analysis
>programs (Star, IRAF and Sextractor) and  two databases developed (one for
>Oracle and one for PostgreSQL).  In the end only one combination resulted in
>published data, the Star - PostgreSQL chain that resulted in the tenxcat.