Due to unexpected clear weather in January, the stack of CDs is now 371 high. This up from 300 last month. Hmmm! It is worth counting the stack.
August 5 September 55 October 47 November 135 December 55 January 71
As you can see, November was a very good month for TOM1. Considering that these are the "dark" months, we might get another 180 to complete the year. That is 550 CDs a year, or 30,800 images, or .24 TBytes. With the 3 TOMs running, I will get close to a TByte a year. At 2000 stars per image, that is 60 million measurements a year. Sorry if this gross counting is offensive to the photometrists. The quantity is possible. We shall see what the quality turns out to be.
There was no work done on TOM2 or TOM3 this month. It was not too cold but we did not expect the weather to be good so we did not plan work.
ROB is now mostly assembled. Most of the drives have been tested and most things work. We have decided to change the Declination drive to one with a higher gear ratio. These will be sent out and can be changed in the field.
Realizing that I had no idea of what to do with Michael's pipeline disk, I have signed up at a local community college for an on line Unix course. So far I have learned a lot. I hope to have an attempt at Michael's disk in another couple of weeks.
We have started a production run of 12 camera head PC boards. This will allow assembly of more cameras when the parts arrive from Cary Chleborad.