Other WWW sites of interest to TASS members

At the bottom is a list of other WWW sites with the acronym TASS, all of which are completely unrelated to The Amateur Sky Survey.

• The Cincinnati TASS site home page, maintained by Mike Gutzwiller.
• The Dayton TASS site home page, maintained by Glenn Gombert. It includes informative notes such as Helpful Hints To Setting Up A TASS Mark III Camera.
• TASS at Johns Hopkins
  • The Johns Hopkins TASS site
  • TASS data gathered at JHU, sometimes in real time.
  • The APL Astronomy Club at Johns Hopkins has several members working on TASS.
• Chris Albertson's TASS Software site
• Peter Mount's Scheduler page
• Andrew Bennett's TASS page includes some data analysis of Mark IV frames.
• Martin Nicholson has gathered information on variable star candidates have been found in TASS observations. His compilations are at:
  • http://www.further-education.com/tass/tass90.htm
  • http://www.further-education.com/tass/tass180.htm
  • http://www.further-education.com/tass/tass270.htm
  • http://www.further-education.com/tass/bothvary.htm

• John Bush's "Blink Compare" page
• John Phillip's page of suspected variables in 'texncat'
• Peter McCullough, at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is very active in using TASS-like arrangments of camera lenses and CCDs. Here are several of his projects:
  • A single staring-mode 2Kx2K image with 135-mm lens
  • Stardial, an automatic telescope with on-line data archive.
• The All-Sky Astronomical Survey plans to map bright stars over large areas of the sky using a CCD detector and telephone camera lens. It has already measured over 30,000 stars and found many variable stars.
• The Northern Sky Variability Survey is based on ROTSE survey . The link above takes you to a database which you may query.
• The ATOMIC project at Los Alamos, which uses CCD chips behind 50-mm camera lenses to monitor sky conditions and space junk.
• VSNET an international group devoted to the study of variable stars.
• The Virtual Observatory Network collects data on variable stars.
• The MISAO (Multitudinous Image-based Sky survey by Accumulative Observations) Project
  The project plans to use astronomical images from many different sources to build up a catalog of stellar positions and brightnesses. The site includes source code to measure stellar parameters and calibrate them automatically.
  • The MisV Stars in the TASS Tenxcat Database page shows just what you'd expect :-)
• The STARE project uses precise time-series photometry to search for extrasolar giant planets transiting their parent stars. Their system is very similar to the TASS Mark IV.
• Variable Star Light Curves for Far Southern Stars by Vello Tabur shows light curves for over 1,000 variable stars, measured with a 100mm telephoto lens and CCD camera. Vello Tabur has also found a number of new variable stars with wide-field camera.
• Sky and Telescope's Alert Service contains messages with information on new sources and and time-critical observations.
• The DIRECT Project, which aims to measure the properties of many variable stars in local galaxies M31 and M33 in order to determine their distances.
• The Center for Backyard Astrophysics, The CBA is a group of amateur and professional astronomers (mostly amateur) collaborating to study the light curves of variable stars.
• The Spanish Variable Star Observers' Association (AVE) has both English and Spanish WWW pages at their site. You can find free software for analyzing variable star data there.
• The Eclipsing Binary Stars page is run by Dan Bruton, and contains information about binary stars, links to data, and software for analyzing them.
• Doug Welch studies pulsating variables, especially Cepheids. He has created a couple of pages which demonstrate the behavior of these variables:
  • http://physun.physics.mcmaster.ca/Fac_Welch/Blazhko.html
  • http://www.macho.mcmaster.ca/Demos/Cepheids/WebPL.html
• The Nightfall program is software for Linux which analyzes binary star light curves to build models of the system.
• AstroWeb's list of Astronomical Survey Projects
• Astroweb's list of astronomy software servers
• The American Association of Variable Star Observers: lots of information on a group with decades of visual measurements of variable stars. Records of stars in three constellations are available on-line as of May 27, 1997.
• The British Astronomical Association Variable Star Section: database of current and historical measurements of variable stars by the BAAVSS.
• Tools For Variable Stars: a page of software for the analysis of variable star light curves.
• Data reduction by the MOA project. MOA stands for "Microlensing Observations in AstroPhysics."
• Information Bulletin on Variable Stars A bulletin of IAU commissions 27 and 42, full of up-to-the-minute news and papers on variable stars.
• Check for any known asteroid at a particular location at a particular time, thanks to the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
• Two services offered by Flagstaff Observatory:
  • Ephemeris for one known asteroid at some particular time
  • Lists time when one known asteroid is visible from a site.
• Roy Tucker is using a CCD on the back of his Celestron C14 to look for Near-Earth Objects; he has found a few already, using a drift-scan technique very similar to ours. Check out the Goodrick-Pigott Observatory to learn more about Roy's work.

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