Progress Report for January 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Status Report for January 2002

Due to unexpected clear weather in January, the stack of CDs is now 371 
high.  This up from 300 last month.  Hmmm!  It is worth counting the stack.

August  5
September       55
October 47
November        135
December        55
January 71

As you can see, November was a very good month for TOM1.  Considering that 
these are the "dark" months, we might get another 180 to complete the 
year.  That is 550 CDs a year, or 30,800 images, or .24 TBytes.  With the 3 
TOMs running, I will get close to a TByte a year.  At 2000 stars per image, 
that is 60 million measurements a year.  Sorry if this gross counting is 
offensive to the photometrists.  The quantity is possible.  We shall see 
what the quality turns out to be.

There was no work done on TOM2 or TOM3 this month.  It was not too cold but 
we did not expect the weather to be good so we did not plan work.

ROB is now mostly assembled.  Most of the drives have been tested and most 
things work.  We have decided to change the Declination drive to one with a 
higher gear ratio.  These will be sent out and can be changed in the field.

Realizing that I had no idea of what to do with Michael's pipeline disk, I 
have signed up at a local community college for an on line Unix course.  So 
far I have learned a lot.  I hope to have an attempt at Michael's disk in 
another couple of weeks.

We have started a production run of 12 camera head PC boards.  This will 
allow assembly of more cameras when the parts arrive from Cary Chleborad.

Tom Droege


Due to unexpected clear weather in December, the stack of CDs is now 300 or 
so high. This is up from 230 last month. Mostly TOM1 just runs when I want 
it to.
Heating tape applied to TOM2 solved the "ring around a bright star" 
problem. It seems to be caused by plain old condensation on the (probably) 
objective lens. This probably due to pointing straight up where the lens 
shield does not keep the dew off the lens. I took a small amount of data 
with TOM2, none of it good enough to analyze. It is refreshing to be 
looking at a new field of stars. I am pretty sick of looking at 7.5 North. 
I think work on TOM2 is now over until spring. There is a bunch of work 
that needs to be done and it is just too cold in the dome.
When Dan gets back from his Christmas vacation, we will start working 
seriously on ROB
Michael sent me a data reduction disk and I am working on learning enough 
Linux to figure out how to run it. I finally gave up and signed up for a 
Unix course at the local community college. I need to be led down the trail 
so that I learn basic skills.