Re: Sad news

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

Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:32:26 -0600
From: Thomas F. Droege <droege@fastmail.fm>
To: Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net>
Subject: Re: Sad news

Dear Michael,
      I would like to thank you for the wonderful write-up below.
I have printed it out, as well as other responses, to put in a folder
and place beside a poster of Tom and his TASS telecopes at the
Memorial Service March 1.
    If appropriate, would you pass this on to his colleagues?
    Thank you.
    Jennifer

On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 08:36:00 -0800 (PST), "Tass Mailing List"
<tass@mail.alembic.net> said:
>
> 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
>
-- 
   Thomas F. Droege
   droege@fastmail.fm