Re: Tech Note 66: Degree of Crowding on Mark IV images

[Andrew Bennett <andrew.bennett@ns.sympatico.ca>]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000 14:27:18 -0400, you wrote:

>
>  Inspired by Tom's questions and Andrew's calculations, I wrote
>a program to place stars randomly on a CCD and calculate the
>distance to nearest neighbors.  The results are in Tech Note 66:
>
>     http://a188-L009.rit.edu/tass/technotes/tn0066.html
>
>  The Note shows results for cases from 1,000 to 9,000 stars 
>scatted over an image.  

Aye! But it's worse than that. Stars don't stop when you get
down to M=15. Or M=20. They do stop somewhere - "It is observed
that our CCDs do not melt." - but not soon enough to do us any
good!

My sums assumed a uniform spatial distribution, truncated at
a suitable point to ensure non-melting of CCDs. And ignored
clustering.

Andrew Bennett, Avondale Vineyard, Nova Scotia, Canada.