Software to perform inhomogeneous ensemble photometry

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

  For years, I've been using the inhomogeneous ensemble photometry 
technique described in Honeycutt, PASP 104, 435 (1992)

     http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?
          bibcode=1992PASP..104..435H&db_key=AST&high=416a79eb0026781

to analyze measurements of a set of many stars on many images.
I have _finally_ managed to put my ancient code into a form that
might possibly be used by other people.   This is just a first
attempt, though, and I know of one particular issue which needs
to be fixed (see below).

  Nonetheless, you can find the software at

       http://spiff.rit.edu/ensemble/

It comes in a standard "configure"-type tarball.  Download the
*.tar.gz file, un-zip, un-tar, run "./configure" and then "make" ...
it should be the regular drill.   The package includes a Perl
script called "selftest.pl" which creates a small dataset and
tries to run the software on it.  You can run

        make check

to run the selftest script; if all goes well, you'll see a message
like "All test passed."

  This is the same software I've used to analyze loads of images
of several cataclysmic variables taken at the RIT Observatory, so
I'm pretty sure that it _can_ produce good results in some situations.
You can find examples of its use by looking at any of the
nights listed at

         http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/ritobs/ritobs.html

with observations of V603 Aql, or ASAS 002511, or WZ Sge.

  You can read about the one item I'd like to replace soon by
looking at the NEWS file.

  What does this have to do with TASS?  Well, I've used this software
to analyze a batch of Mark IV measurements for stars in some small
(say, 0.5-by-0.5-degree) area of the sky.  See Tech Note 100:

     http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/technotes/tn0100.html

I did this "by hand", downloading a set of measurements from the
Mark IV database and then massaging them to put them in a format
that my code could read properly.  It took several hours and was
a real pain.  

  I re-wrote a few small sections of my ensemble analysis code
to make it much easier to run it on data taken from a database.
I _think_ that it may be possible now to create a script which,
given some (RA, Dec) position, 

          - grabs all data for all stars in the region from the
                     Mark IV database
          - breaks up the result into a set of pieces, one
                     per Mark IV image (just sort by JD and
                     grab all measurements with the same JD)
          - runs the ensemble code on the resulting data 
                     to generate improved _relative_
                     photometry of stars in the region

  I will try doing this myself, but given my current commitments, 
probably won't finish it this calendar year.  Sigh.

  I guess it's possible that some people reading this message
might want to use the code on non-TASS data, too ...

                                             Michael Richmond