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

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Dirk and all,

(Strong effort not to be blunt.  Effort failed.)

I seem to have collected a group of strong individuals.  I did this by 
design.  They want to do everything themselves their own way.  If you want 
to get direction, go to the CBO, AAVSO, or the like.  I am a slip sliding 
sneak sniding snake in the bullrushes.  So I am trying to figure out how to 
get strong individuals to work with direction.  If I say "here are some 
jobs to do" the people I respect will immediately leave, or at least start 
doing something else.

The goal is a standardized project where everyone shares the work to do an 
all sky survey.  I know that no one I want would sign up for such a 
project.  So I am trying to trick them into doing it anyway.  The scheme is 
to give away telescope systems that are really only good to do the above 
project.  I will be content if no useful sky survey work comes out of the 
systems that I give away.  To use them at all, they will have to write 
software.  That I cannot do.  I hope that they will share the software with 
me.  Then I can do the all sky survey.  In general, this is working.

So you can put me on the rack and you will not pull out a set of directions 
for jobs to do.  But I can be sneaky about this too, and I have a 
scheme.  I will think about it.

The Mark IVs if they are used at all will probably be used on projects not 
quite in my line.  But, for example, to do a planet search one will have to 
develop pretty good photometry accuracy.  I presume good color 
transformations are not so critical to planet searches.  Others are 
interested in the color transformations.  So between the various Mark IVs I 
hope to get all the elements I need for the all sky survey.

I note that you are just such an individual from your own words below:

>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

There should be lots of new eclipsing binaries in  the data I already 
have.  Why not study your own new eclipsing binary instead of ones that 
others have discovered?  Tass should be such a source.  Perhaps you can be 
motivated to mine the data I have to your own end.  ;^)

I would much rather have you use my data to find things of interest to you 
than to try to direct you to build part of what I need.  If you do what 
interests you, you can not help but do things that will help tass.

Tom Droege

At 01:48 PM 1/30/02 -0700, you wrote:
>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
>