Talk by Dr. David Charbonneau

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

There was nothing in the talk that was not covered in the two papers that I 
have seen.

I was able to talk quite a bit with Charbonneau at the luncheon.  I really 
did not learn much.  He plans to have a collaboration between three 
locations.  One at Lowell/Flagstaff, one at Palomar, and one in the Canary 
Islands.  He is buying commercial parts to put together the system he will 
run at Palomar.  He has a thinned CCD.  ($20,000) It is not clear he has 
funding for, but sounded like he has money to put together one system, and 
then has two collaborators.  The one thing that got a rise out of him was 
when I mentioned how much I had spent on tass.

His data shows a floor at about 0.003 mag.  I was not able to get much out 
of him about this.  From looking at my data, it looks like the floor is at 
0.015 mag.  So he is a factor of 5 better with a similar set up.  OK, he 
has a thinned CCD, so that should some improvement over us.  He also has an 
evacuated camera head, so that should buy a little more.  It may be that 
the quoted 0.003 comes from the Lowell data where they may be running a 
camera with a dewar etc., instead of a TEC.   I think we just have to work 
harder to improve accuracy.

I tried to get him to talk about his software.  I did not learn much.  He 
said that there was himself and one other that knew how to run it, and that 
it would be more work than it was worth to try to get it in shape where it 
could be shared with others.

I tried to see if he was interested in sharing programs with us.  One of 
the reasons for multiple stations he gave in his talk was that by spacing 
stations around the globe, a program star could be followed for a longer 
time.  Seems to me he should have been interested in having some of the 
tass locations participate in long term tracking projects.  He specifically 
mentioned that Flagstaff and Palomar had different weather patterns so that 
there was a high likelihood that one station would be functional.

I got a lot more out of talking to the Sloan astronomers who were sitting 
next to me at the lunch table.  I was really encouraged by our 
discussion.  I can see what will the right science for me.  Sit on the 
northern hemisphere and just take a lot of time data.  Everyone else wants 
so go after specific hot things.  I think that some good science will come 
from a complete, long term survey.

There is a good chance that the whole talk will show up as a streaming 
video presentation from the Fermilab site in a week or two.  The talk was 
videotaped, and I think that they do this for all the talks.

If it does, it will show up at:

http://www-ppd.fnal.gov/EPPOffice-w/colloq/colloq.html

Tom Droege