Progress and Plans

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

The tree trimmers are here removing the tree and I can't watch.  The guy 
doing it is taking huge risks.  I have had trees done before, and this guy 
is just whacking away without the usual safety ropes and so forth.  Well, 
it is not bad enough to throw them out and risk a law suit, but I am still 
nervous.  It is almost done.

I now plan to finish ROB, and then do no more telescopes until I have 
analyzed some data.

The data is piling up.  I have about 175 CD ROMs of data similar to 
DS-19.  So when the clouds roll in in about a month I want to start working 
on it.

One risk of running a project like this out in the open is that everyone 
takes a mind set on the quality of the data.  I is always best to never 
show anything but the best data.  If you are inside a project, then you 
know what the data really looks like.  You all are "inside" this 
project.  But please don't take a mind set about the quality of the 
data.  It is getting better and better as I learn to adjust everything.

I guess that at a big installation, the erectors build the telescope, 
adjust it, and then "turn it over" in working condition to the working 
astronomers.  Here we are all doing the whole project, I hope.

With the cold weather, the cooling system works better.  It no longer is 
working at saturation, so the temperature is holding to a sigma of about .1 
degree by the readout.  It is probably much better.  To get a good reading 
would require taking the mean of a bunch of readings.  This is because the 
measuring system is noisy.  With multiple measurement I bet the control is 
more like 0.01 degree.  This should help with the darks and flats.

I seem to have cured the fogging on the V camera that you all can see on 
DS-19.  I note that only Michael complained, so this is a measure of how 
many of you are actually looking at all those disks that I sent out.  ;^)

I interviewed with someone from "The Economist" yesterday.  He asked the 
usual question "what are your goals".  I explained that tass does not have 
goals, but my goal was to do a photometric survey of the whole sky as often 
as I can for as long as I can do it.  That is my goal and it is time to get 
on with it.

I don't have to find planets to do a survey that is worthwhile to 
me.  Someone with a big telescope and a good mount at a dark location will 
always be able to do better.  My hope is to get a complete (now northern 
hemisphere) survey that covers a range of epochs.  It seems to me that the 
present accuracy is good enough to be useful.  I would hope that as time 
goes on the error bars will get smaller.

Tom Droege