Wild Speculation

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

First, I am encouraged that the data is picking up real asteroid crossings 
of stars in the data base.  This gives me some confidence in the data.  No 
doubt we could track this asteroid (and others) with the single hit data.

So far, we have a sample of two.  One is an asteroid, the other is 
unknown.  Is anyone interested in looking at more examples?

I could search the data for stars that have 10 or more measurements with 
one or more high points.  My dumb approach would be to compute sigma for 
the measurements of each star and then look for 5 sigma high points.  I 
could probably do this in a couple of days.  My guess from manually paging 
through the data is that I might get a couple of hundred objects from my 2 
million star list.

Would anyone want to work on this data set if I make it?

Even better, does someone want to write a perl script that will process the 
data file and output a string or interesting star measurements?  I can do 
this, but it will take me a few days.   I suspect that most of you can dash 
it off in 10 minutes.   OK, the actual file that I have is called 
collected.t and is the result of merging the .cal files, sorting, removing 
flagged entries and processing the result through collect_stars.pl.

In a spirit of fun, I will give the first person who sends me a working 
perl script a week head start on the resulting data.  Send me a script, I 
will send you a data set.  It should be small enough that I can just attach 
it to an e-mail.   I reserve the right to allow ties if I don't get back to 
reading my e-mail soon enough.

The format was presented in the post.  I will answer any questions about 
it, but it is well defined by collect_stars.pl which is available on the 
home page.

Tom Droege