Status Report for March 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Only 18 CDs during March.  The stack is now 454 high.  I think I could have 
taken more if I worked harder at it.  It was more a question of the RA I 
wanted to see not coming when the sky was expected to be clear, so I did 
not try to run.

Dan has been chugging away producing cameras.  There are 12 that are pretty 
near completion.  To give an idea of their status, the next job is to hook 
them up to the test set up and check the voltages that appear at the CCD 
pins.  This just to make sure that everything is safe to plug in the 
CCD.  Saturday we were exercising the shutters.  Next I will have to 
install TECs in some of the cameras since they are broken.  The next step 
after that will be to install a CCD and check to see if I can get an 
image.  Much work has been done on the shutters.  They work better.  It is 
just a question of opening up tolerances and finding better glue.

I have been learning Unix.  This month saw me get a set of images through 
the pipeline for the first time on my own.  It is great fun to look at data 
and to start finding things.  I have now worked 5 sets of images through 
the pipeline and have found 1-3 interesting objects in each set.  This is 
very encouraging to me.  These are all short period objects.  The longer 
periods will come with time.

My accountant tried to take my entire contributions to tass to date off my 
income tax this year.  I do not think I want to do that.  I was so shocked 
that I filed for an extension.  He said "you did spend all that money".  It 
is still not clear whether having tass as a non-profit corp will be worth 
the effort.  I will spend a few hours with him after April 15 debating 
strategy with the IRS.

Tom Droege