Production Run Status

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I have now completed 21 VI run pairs.  Eleven are in the 6-8 hour 
range.  Since this covers the galactic equator, there are lots of stars.  A 
pretty full test of the pipeline, I think.

So far, it has only hung once.  This on data that included dawn or clouds 
or both.  I am not sure what happened.  In any case, deleting the end files 
allowed the run to process.

Looks like I can process about 3 run pairs a day.  I have not yet automated 
the process, so it depends on me getting up in the middle of the night to 
keep my computer busy.  Those of you that are older will know that this is 
no particular problem.  I no longer want to sleep for long periods, but I 
do need to take naps during the day.

There are 14 VI pairs yet to run in the 6-8 hour range.  When completed, I 
will have 150 or so pair measurements for 50,000 or so stars.  This should 
be enough to get a good idea of the accuracy of the data.

Michael has posted references for several surveys.  Our data seems to have 
similar accuracy.  About 0.02 mag for the brighter stars increasing to 0.1 
at the magnitude limit.  Possibly we can make this better with more 
corrections, if not it would still seem to be publishable.

The production process seems to be CPU limited.  top usually says 
99.1%.  This is good.  It looks like I ordered the right mix for the dual 
CPU system.  Low cost IDE drives and AMD cpus.

When the run is complete, I will make the .cal files available on a CD.  I 
am hoping that some of you will develop good schemes for finding the 
variables.  We need a Welsh-Stetson code to process the data, and anything 
else that you all can find.

Tom Droege