Re: Small adjustment to strategy for TOM1

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Michael,

Could you explain why the data set is stronger?  This is hard to do, for a 
number of practical reasons.

Sometimes (as you will discover) things just do not turn on when you want 
them to.  Or when you turn on you discover the system is fogged, or there 
is a big ice crystal, or ...  Then one goes into fix mode, and the star 
field goes by until you get it fixed.  The choice is then a shorter run, or 
miss the field or miss data collection time.

A good control system will help.  I encourage you all to work on this.

I am sure that with time things will get smoother and smoother.  That is 
why I am trying to run a specific program.  The way I am running, sooner or 
later the fields will overlap.

Tom

At 05:18 PM 10/17/01 -0400, you wrote:
>   If you can arrange it so that the 2 or 3 fields you follow each
>night are _roughly_ the same (that is, there's an overlap of at
>least one degree in RA from night to night to night), then your
>dataset will be much stronger than if the "follow" fields are
>different on each night.
>
>   One sort of simple way to ensure this is to move to the home position
>in RA at 1:00 AM and start a follow run tonight; then, tomorrow night,
>move to the home position at 0:56 AM; and the next night, start at
>home position at 0:52 AM, and so on.  The same stars will rise/transit/set
>4 minutes earlier each night.