Progress

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Five more CCDs just arrived.  Now I can afford to send some off for Lumigen 
coating.  They still came from Lockheed, so I assume that they have not yet 
been merged.  Looks like I have a total of 25 good CCDs counting the ones 
that have been shipped.

I have been looking at images on the CCD list and wondered why they always 
looked so good to me compared to the ones from the Mark IV.  Finally I 
brought one into Image Scientist where I could measure things, and found 
that the range was not so many bits.

If I take a Mark IV image and integer divide it by 50 or so, then the noise 
goes away, and the image display programs do the right thing to make the 
picture look great.  Not much use for photometry, but good for my soul.  I 
still have a 1000 to one dynamic range on a recent Mark IV image, which is 
greater than the CCD group image that I was looking at.

One of the problems that I have is that I have never seen any data but my 
own.  Possibly some professional astronomer could send me a CD full of raw 
images for Christmas just so I could browse it and learn what images look 
like in the field.  Then again, it will probably just make me feel bad, as 
I don't need to look at only a few electrons of noise.  The fact is, unless 
I could get ROTSE raw data or something similar, most people are doing 
things enough different that it would be hard to make a comparison.

Tom Droege