Pipeline and Introduction

[<rknowles@woh.rr.com>]

Group,

I didn't want to add to the bandwidth until I had something to say so I've
been lurking for a couple weeks just reading the assorted TASS info and
trying to make heads / tails of it.  I guess the time has come...

My name is Rich Knowles and I'm located in Oxford OH, not far from Miami
University.  I am previously from Fermilab where I met Tom many moons ago.
I'm a computer science type who dabbles in various other things, including
Astronomy.  Monday through Friday I am an Information Security Consultant
for GE.

A few days ago Tom provided me with the Pipeline software and some DS20
disks and I am about to embark on doing some number crunching.  I've gotten
the pipeline up on my system (which is a Duron 900mhz, 64Mb memory, Mandrake
7.2) and it seems to run with the test data, but I'm a little puzzled about
what I'm seeing.  Since I'm trying to troubleshoot in unfamiliar territory
I'm going slow here so please excuse me if my question is too elementary.
:^)

In looking at the collation file for hra2011797 I noticed that the minimum
magnitude is 16.701.  This is termed as the Raw Magnitude, and I'm wondering
how seriously to take this number.  The point is, when I look at the frame
with DS9, there seems to be some pretty respectably bright stars there and I
wonder whether these numbers are right.  Checking my results against what is
in the distro CD they match up (for this frame at least) and in reading Mike
Richmond's web page, nothing jumps out at me to suggest the magnitude number
is 'gospel'.  Anyone have experiences that might help?

If I am to be convinced by what I'm seeing then it looks like I have a
pipeline up and running and will be starting to do some number cruncing in
the next few weeks.

BTW, on my machine, the entire sample set of data took around 40-50 minutes
to run.

Rich Knowles