Progress Report for October 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

102 data CDs were generated during October from TOM1, 2, and 3.  This is a 
record amount of data, particularly since I am putting more data on each disk.

I am as busy as a one arm paper hanger getting everything going at 
dusk.  This is often when Jennifer arrives home, so it is of some risk to 
my marriage.  Eventually I will want to automate more things, but for now I 
must check a lot of things by hand.  I then get up at dawn and spend a 
couple of hours writing data to CDs.  No big deal since at 72 I don't sleep 
through the night anyway, so it is up at dawn, then back to bed for a long 
nap.

The breakthrough of the month was the discovery that I could stop down the 
I camera without losing very much data and improve the data quality.  Still 
working on this but it appears to be promising.

Drawings were completed for a modification to the declination drive that I 
hope will allow accurate declination positioning.  We shall see.  The 
drawings are out to the machine shop and I should have parts in a couple of 
weeks.

We continue to make Mark V drawings.  A couple of weeks were lost because 
Dan decided to get married.  Sigh!  I think he will survive the process.

We have shipped off the big data file to Michael Sallman who hopes to be 
able to put it on line.  I have also sent Michael Richmond some data taken 
at the equator with TOM2 and TOM3 in hopes that he can come to some 
conclusion about the comparison of tass data to Landolt standards.

Tom Droege