Information about TASS, The Amateur Sky Survey.

This project, aka TASS, is building astronomical cameras and distributing them to sites around the world; our goal is to study bright objects across large sections of the sky. Our first major project was the Mark III Survey of the Celestial Equator. We are now working on a bigger, better camera, the Mark IV, which will be able to look away from the celestial equator and follow objects for several hours. The first one has already been delivered to Flagstaff, where it has started a two-passband survey of the northern sky and taken some pretty pictures .

Don't we know everything about bright stars already? Not really -- read Bohdan Paczynski's articles

• The Future of Massive Variability Searches, either the abstract only (HTML) or the entire paper (Postscript).
• Current Status of the Microlensing Surveys, of which I've made a local copy of the Postscript file .
• Monitoring All Sky for Variability published in PASP. You can find a postscript copy on the LANL preprint server, and I've made a local postscript copy, too.

If this is your first visit to the TASS site, you should read the Show-and-Tell presentations on the Mark IV camera and TASS status as of 03 Jan 2001 . If you are interested in helping us out, please read Tom Droege's description of How to Play the TASS Game.

What's New? (apart from the ever-growing E-mail archive)

Apr 4, 2010

Doug Welch at McMaster University has taken on the job of reading the images from Tom Droege's years of scanning the sky. Thanks, Doug!

Show-and-Tell	Pretty pictures	Sample data and variables	Did I find a new variable star?
Search the TASS site	E-mail archive	Philosophy	Anon FTP area
Access the Mark III database	Access the Mark IV dataset	Quickly download Mark IV data	Entire Mark IV datasets
Evolution of TASS cameras	Pictures of Mark III	Mark IV	Analysis of early data
Technical notes	Service Notes	Stellar catalogs	Articles on photometry
Meetings	Locations with cameras	WWW sites of interest	Publications
CVS Repository	Software	Status reports	Wiki

Information on joining/leaving the TASS E-mail list:

To send E-mail to the list, address it to tass-request@tass-survey.org.

Jul 16, 2009. MWR

This page maintained by Michael Richmond, whom you may contact at mwrsps@rit.edu
Last modified Apr 4, 2010.