Another interesting paper, on the HAT Survey

[Stupendous Man <richmond@stupendous.cis.rit.edu>]

  A team of Hungarian astronomers has created the "HAT", for "Hungarian
Automated Telescope".  Actually, there are several HATs, scattered
throughout the American Southwest and Hawaii.  Each is similar to 
ASAS: a telephoto camera lens focusing light onto a big CCD.  The
HAT telescopes have a field of view of 9x9 degrees, and measure
stars in the magnitude range I=6-13.  

  You can read about HAT at their WWW site,

       http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~gbakos/HAT/

and in a paper on astro-ph

       http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0401219

  One (?) of the current goal(s) of the HAT team is to find planets
around other stars by the transit technique.  They have found that
the tiny dips in brightness are easier to detect if they intentionally
broaden their PSF by moving the telescope during an exposure!
Read the paper above for details.

  It's a bit hard to tell from what little I've read, but I think
that HAT and the TASS Mark IV are complementary.  I _think_ that HAT
is concentrating on certain areas of the sky; it can't go all the
way up to the North Celestial Pole.  It also takes pictures in a
single passband, similar to Cousins I, and doesn't take a great
deal of trouble to calibrate its photometry.  But it does a 
great job on finding low-level variability.

                                    Michael