Re: Newbie: observation request?

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I have been having relatively good luck imaging RR CrB for Arron Price.  So 
far I have images for three nights.

010609          9 Images
010610          6 Images plus two in clouds but possibly OK
010613          11 Images

I will have a go for a few more nights, then I will ship off a pile of data 
disks to Aaron.

I must say that MIKE is producing better images than I get from TOM in 
spite of not being properly lined up to the polar axis.  It is too much 
trouble to do this for test.

There are ice crystal problems on these images, but so far the star has not 
sat on a spot where it could not be measured well.  The ice crystals are a 
real pain.  I may yet have to resort to a dry gas bottle to keep them off 
the images.  You should know that it is so humid in Chicago that if I run 
the air conditioner, it freezes up.  Sigh!

The images are spaced a little more than a minute in time apart and just 
march across the frames.  So here is lots of data where the stars appear in 
all possible positions across the frame.  Good for calibration, I 
think.   I have set the exposure at 50 seconds (except for 0609 when it was 
60).  This get an image just short of saturation.  Looks like I have fixed 
the gain problem.  So the first two nights have half the gain of the last 
one.  Sigh!  Aaron, I did say that this is test data.  I think this will 
not affect the measurements that you can make from the images, it will just 
be a pain to cope with.

Possibly some of you testing pipelines will be willing to run these images 
through your pipeline to get calibrated data for Aaron.  Possibly Aaron 
will want to do it for himself.  What say Aaron?

Tom Droege


At 12:58 AM 6/11/01 -0400, you wrote:

>  First off, thanks for all the feedback to Tom and the others. I am truly
>starting to see the potential these systems provide. The future is very
>bright if this gets completed to such a degree that reliable systematic
>observations begin. And even until that point, as Tom is showing, even the
>testing phase can yield some good results.
>  This (analyzing the data) is all new to me so it will take some time to
>get it figured out. However, I have some great friendly people willing to
>help me in specific areas of the science. With tools like that you can't
>go wrong! I am on break from school next week until August 30, so I intend
>to spend this summer learning the ropes from the pros, so to speak. One
>item on my agenda is to learn how to mine TASS data. The Pipeline project
>will definately interest me and I intend to go over the discussion group
>archives and web site to get a handle on that too. I cant wait to get my
>hands on the CDROMs.
>  FWIW, one of my long term goals (2-3 years from now) is to get well
>enough versed in using data to begin pointing others in the right
>direction. I'd love to be able to be as helpful to others starting out as
>many have been helpful to me. So hopefully this is an investment in time
>that will pay off even further down the road via orders of "magnitude"
>(pun quite intended). :)
>
>Aaron Price, Technical Assistant, Technology
>American Association of Variable Star Observers
>http://www.aavso.org