Re: Sad news

[Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net>]

Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:45:59 -0600
From: Michael Sallman <msallman@pro-ns.net>
To: Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net>
Subject: Re: Sad news

There's not much more I can say that hasn't been said already by others. One 
thing is that I wish I had gotten to meet him in person.
I had just come in from setting up the scope tonight, to follow up on a new 
variable in the TASS data, when I read the email.
As I said to him many times, I really appreciate the opportunity he has given 
me (and others) to participate in this great adventure called TASS. He will be 
missed.
Rest in peace Tom.

Mike

Tass Mailing List wrote:
> 
> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:55:31 -0500
> From: Michael Richmond <richmond@stupendous.cis.rit.edu>
> To: tass@tass-survey.org
> Cc: mwrsps@rit.edu
> Subject: Sad news
> 
>
>   Tom Droege passed away two days ago, after fighting against
> cancer for several years.
>
>   Tom founded TASS way back in 1994, when he was intrigued by the idea
> of using his electronics skills to take pictures of the sky.  His first
> attempt, the TASS Mark I, was based on a one-dimensional FAX scanning
> chip.  Over the next five years, he built more sophisticated devices:
> the Mark III systems, for example, were designed around triplets of
> camera lenses, focusing light on three CCDs and operating in drift-scanning
> mode.  They were used by a number of observers to generate a photometric
> catalog of 367,241 stars around the celestial equator.  In 1999, he
> finished the first Mark IV systems, each of which has two large custom-built
> refracting telescopes making simultaneous measurements in two passbands.
> Tom set up three of the Mark IV systems on the roof of his house in
> Batavia, Illinois, and ran them on every clear night.  His many years
> of hard work led to a photometric catalog of the entire northern sky,
> containing over one hundred million measurements.
>
>   Of course, Tom didn't view this as "hard work" -- for him, it was
> both fun and intriguing.  He wrote a little essay on "How to play the
> TASS game" which includes this quotation:
>
>        "Many of you have spent hundreds of hours playing Zork or
>         Adventure.  I did, and on an ASR-33. With a similar effort
>         you can play 'tass'. The result may be much more satisfying
>         than finding the paper gold or diamonds. You will discover
>         a real scientific result ..."
> 
> For Tom, TASS was a game -- one of the most interesting games in the
> world.  He spent years enjoying himself, building cameras, solving puzzles,
> and adding to the astronomical community's collective knowledge.
> I can only hope that I may have as much fun playing the science game
> as Tom did.
>
>                                Michael Richmond
> 
>