October Monthly Report

["Thomas Droege" <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

October started out great.  By mid month the total was nearing the record
September total.  Then the clouds just rolled in and I only got about
50,000 measurements in the last half of the month.  

The TOM2 and TOM3 "cloud" chambers were fixed by taking the lenses apart,
drying everything thoroughly, and then sealing the front lens with RTV.  I
hope that they will now be water tight, and if rain falls on them I will
just have to clean off the front lens.
It may be recalled that an effort to do this by stretching a plastic film
over the end of the lens failed miserably, completely destroying the focus.


Dan has started construction of a big black box which should allow me to
test cameras in the lab instead of mounting them on a telescope.  This
should allow the test stand to completely simulate a camera.  I should have
done this 5 years ago, it would have saved a lot of development time.

Jim Fisher has started doing some work on the Mark V.  He is estimating how
much aluminum we will have to buy to make 3 systems.  This will leave two
for my roof and the possibly of shipping one out to some better location.  

I have been working on the problem measurements.  As you all know we made
an early decision to keep all the data that survives the cuts built into
the pipeline.  I have started work on software that will allow marking the
measurements with a "quality" number based on how well the frame matches
other measurements of the stars in the frame.  

I am slowly adjusting the tilt of the cameras brought about by the
installation of the focus stiffeners.  Before the stiffeners, the design
tended to minimize the tilt.  Now it is possible to have tilt, so I have
had to make some fixtures and attempt to adjust the tilt to zero.  It is
small, but adjusting it out give sharper images.  

Jim Fisher got the LX200 running and has even fixed it after it failed. 
The hope is to put a camera on it and use it for follow up observations of
interesting stars. 

Tom Droege