TN-81

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Many thanks to Andrew for TN-81.  Looking at the first couple of figures, 
it would seem to me that this is good enough for an engineering run.  I 
read the results as being of order 0.01 mag below 10.5, increasing to 0.1 
at the limit of mag 14 for V.  I think there are lots of good measurements 
to be made between 11 and 13 where Michael has promised us that measurement 
will be "praiseworthy".

 From Michael's note:  "In Praise of  Twelfth Magnitude":

>I agree 100% with Arne: the Mark IV _can_ do "real science"
>even at mag 12, or mag 10. Yes, (almost) every object which is
>mag 12 has been seen and recorded before by someone --- BUT
>so what? In (almost) every case, the recorded and catalogued
>measurements are
>a) years old
>b) a very few epochs
>c) taken only in the V-band, or the "photographic" passband
>What we _don't_ have is a set of accurate and precise photometric
>measurements, at the 3-5 percent level, of thousands of stars in
>the V-band and the I-band. Nor do we have knowledge of the variability
>of all these stars. And, and, in just a FEW cases (say, 1 in 10 million),
>we don't even have accurate positions, because the stars are moving
>_so_ fast that they move an arcsecond every year, and matching up
>such extremely fast-moving stars on different plates taken years
>apart is really hard (Arne knows a lot more about this particular
>item than I do, of course, and I hope he'll correct me if I'm way
>off here. But I do think that is the possibility to catch the
>one-in-10-million or 1-in-100-million shot here).

I read Michael's later tech notes to have a similar result.  I have just a 
few weeks more of Unix class and then I will be ready to have a go at 
taking Michael's disk and trying to rpocess all those disks that I 
have.  Time to get started, I think.

Tom Droege