Last Night

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I collected 24 x 180 = 4320 square degrees of the sky last night with 
TOM1.  This is 1/10 of the whole sky.  When I run TOM2 and TOM3 this will 
be 3/10 of this sky on a winter night and half that on a summer night.  But 
it is really twice that for the sky I can see.

This is not yet "good" data.  But it is still possible to use it to pick 
out variable star candidates as a number of you can attest.

The black flocked paper came in.  It really looks "black" when you look at 
it head on.  When you look at it at a shallow grazing angle (where it 
really has to work) it is not as black.  Sigh!  Possibly we will need the 
black paint and walnut shells.  (This is not yet a call for you to save 
your Christmas stocking walnut shells for me.)

While I was writing this, UPS came and I have the stiffeners.  I just 
installed them in the V camera and it looks like they do the job.  At least 
the focus for the V camera is now very smooth.  They came in anodized a 
pretty blue.  So we add some color to the Mark IV.  As soon as I get clear 
sky I will test the focus with the new stiffeners.

Meanwhile I have a plan to use xvista to remove the natural sky gradient in 
the proper order for computation.  Michael's tools are very nice and easy 
to use.  His man pages give lots of useful examples.  This is something I 
notice that unix avoids.

So progress is progressing.  I have great hope to start a real survey in 
March.

Tom Droege