Where do we stand? (was Re: SETI like tass project)

["Dirk Terrell" <terrell@boulder.swri.edu>]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002 14:26:32 -0600, Tom Droege wrote:

>OK, I am not complaining.  I understand human nature.  I am really in the 
>entertainment biz., and I know it.  Still, I hope that some of you can be 
>entertained by diving into this data and learning how to get a good 
>scientific result from it.

Well, it would help me to have a list of things that need to get done,
who's working on them, and what the status is. I understand your
laissez-faire philosophy for the project but I think a small amount of
direction would help move things along more quickly. It seems that we
are stuck at the basic reduction stage: turning images into
time,position,brightness for detected objects. I do CCD photometry and
I have developed my own pipeline that is optimized (i.e. built rather
inflexibly <g>) for the kind of observing I do which is light curves of
eclipsing binaries. I could probably modify it to be more general but
it seems that at least a couple of people are actively working on this
part of the problem. I'm puzzled that this has turned out to be such a
troublesome part because we aren't the first to do this. MACHO, OGLE,
etc have obviously figured it out. Perhaps those actively working on
the data reduction pipeline can give the rest of us an idea of what
needs to be done. I am more than willing to help if someone says "Hey,
I need something to do such and such..."

Dirk