Flocked Paper

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

It appears that the "Flocked Paper" addition has come to the best possible 
conclusion.

1)  It did not effect the shape of the error distribution.
2) It did reduce greatly - almost a factor of two - the sky background.
3) It allowed finding fainter stars.  Of order a half magnitude more 
sensitivity.

I think it should have effected the error distribution.  I think the reason 
it did not was that something else effected it more.

What this means:

1) It is worth adding flocked paper to TOM2 and TOM3.
2) It is still worth reprocessing all the old data.

A first pass at using Michael's new pipeline indicated that the low 
magnitude error distribution improved.  Everything appears to be getting a 
little better.

Sigh!  Now I have to go down in the basement and fight with those lenses.

OK, all in all it was worth making our own lens design.  But I have paid a 
terrible price in frustration with the implementation of the design.  I 
have had to learn a lot of things that I really did not need to learn.  The 
end result is a very flat lens.  The lens is flat to 2-3% in the corners 
compared to 50% down in the corners for the lenses that our "competitors" 
are using.  This should help us a lot.  They are having a big problem with 
flat fielding.  We should have much less of a problem.  But then they are 
in good locations and I am in Batavia, IL.  The better lenses may almost 
make up for the terrible sky.

Tom Droege