September Started

[Thomas Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

September is off to a good start.  We have been doing a lot of maintenance.
We cleaned the lenses, rebuilt one RA drive, replaced a computer, reloaded
a lot of software, and processed (almost) everything to fix the day off
problem.  We also tore all the cooling water tubing out of the TOM2,TOM3
combo and replaced it with a larger size.  I have been keeping Dan and Mike
Watson busy.  We can now actually see the water flow.  With the restart of
one of the six pipelines this morning to add a missing one in
markiv_driver.param, everything ran to completion.  I now have 12 CDs in
the September stack.  So far we seem to be running ahead of last year with
more of the telescopes running more of the time.  

We realize that a lot of mediocre data does not replace a lot of great
data.  However, what one seems to be able to get in Batavia is mediocre
data.  A sigma of 0.05 at the brightest magnitudes to 0.5 at the faintest
useful magnitudes is not going to find planets.  It will however, find most
of the red variables in its magnitude range and a lot of other objects
which vary a few tenths in magnitude.  I am content to do what is possible.
It may be that a lot of computation will improve the results.  Looking at
the other wide field experiments, I don't see so much improvement that I
think there is a lot of hope.  We will generate a lot of data that is a big
step up in accuracy over visual estimation.  We already have a lot more
measurements than are in the AAVSO data base.  We will shortly exceed the
number associated with variable stars.

Tom Droege