Status Report for November 2001

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

A reminder to all that are doing work.  It is OK to write a brief status 
report to be included on the home page.  It is sometimes nice to look 
through these to see what has been accomplished.

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Status Report from tass Batavia, IL for November 2001

We continue to take data with TOM1, but the clouds have moved in and I 
don't expect much for the next few months.  The stack of data is now about 
230 ROMs, up from 110 last month.  The data looks better and better.  I 
estimate that we have 20 million measurements of 150,000 stars accumulated 
so far.

The light box was dug out of the cabinet and flats were taken with 
it.  They looked pretty good, so these flat runs became the basis for a new 
data distribution, Data Set 20.  This was a 10 CD set and it took some time 
to duplicate the 150 or so disks sent out.

TOM2 has seen stars.  Some time was spent rebuilding the dome supports that 
hold the telescopes so that TOM2 and TOM3 could be leveled and aligned.  I 
forgot to take into account that the roof under the dome is not completely 
flat.  The alignment would appear to be better than TOM1.   The cameras 
just barely fit in the dome.  ( A 7' diameter clam shell).  I had to have 
Dan make short lens shields to fit.  The first data had funny rings around 
saturated stars but was taken without lens shields.  A brief data run 
indicates that the lens shields might reduce this problem.

I have started to learn Linux.  I will be hard to get along with for the 
winter months when I plan to just sit in front of a terminal and struggle.

Tom Droege