Re: The ATOMIC sky survey project.

[Tom Droege <droege@FNAL.GOV>]

Yep, I know about this group.  They are also the proud owners of a 
genuine Mark II camera system.  That is, if their safety people have
not thrown it in the garbage.  You all will remember that I took the
Mark II out there and set it up and got it working.  The safety people
later saw it and cut the plug off the power supply.  I think they 
eventually got it working again.  In my defense, the Mark II was 
designed to be operated in my home, not a big government laboratory.
It thus had real "bread board" design.  At least the power supply
was screwed down to a piece of 1" by 10" board.  There was exposed
110 AC lines, etc.. 

I gave a talk to the group at the time and proposed just the design
that they have implemented.  Even offered to build it.  

I correspond with them from time to time.  It is hard to track the 
students as they don't stay around long.

As near as I can tell, it is a project with a large political content.

Chris, thanks for pointing me to their home page.  I will keep watch.

Tom Droege  

At 11:42 AM 4/15/98 -0700, you wrote:
>I got an interesting e-mail.  There is a group building a system like
>the one Tom envisioned before the target became variable stars and the
>lenses got longer.  These folks are using ~1k, 9um chips with 50mm f/1.2
>lenses.  Some of their goals are monitoring sky brightens and weather.
>but they also want to see transient astronomical events and space "junk".
>(I doubt they will see much of the later)
>
>The current state of the project is that they have a couple cameras
>operational out of a planned set of 20.  They can collect data but
>are not yet processing it.
>
>They have a web site:   http://hana-mana.lanl.gov/atomic/
>
>
>-- 
>--Chris Albertson
>
>  chris@topdog.logicon.com                Voice:  626-351-0089  X127
>  Logicon RDA, Pasadena California          Fax:  626-351-0699
>
>