Why not start now?

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Arne will be back from vacation soon, I am taking data, Michael will pick 
up his Mark IV in early December.  There is lots of data.

Why not start processing it now?

I would like to have the feedback from someone processing data and 
complaints that I should  be doing this or that.

If we had a collaboration at a university somewhere, there would probably 
be several people working.  We can act here just like a university 
collaboration.  I remember doing High Energy Physics before collaborations 
became 1000 strong.  There were like 4 of us doing an experiment.  On 
physicist who did real time programming, one physicist that designed new 
types of detectors, one physicist who did data reduction software, and 
myself designing the data collection electronics.  Everybody helped 
building the experiment.  In those days everyone had to be on the 
site.  Carrying paper tape to the big IBM 650 for data reduction.

Now we can form the same type of collaboration by the internet.  someone 
just has to want to do it.  I can feed data in the form of CD ROMs starting 
now to anyone that wants to set up a reduction pipeline to produce star lists.

One person does not have to do everything.

One can set up the pipeline and debug it.  Then he can pass the program to 
several others where I can send production data.  All can pass the star 
lists to a central point, or we can start working on the distributed data base.

We don't have to get it right the first time.  I can assure you all that we 
won't.  The quicker we start looking at the data the quicker we can start 
making the changes to the pipeline to get a good result.

The real point, there is nothing preventing us from doing everything now.

Tom Droege