Tass Information Section

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I am working on an information section for the tass home page.  "The How I 
Designed the Mark IV Camera Sysem" is the first in this effort.  I expect 
to do a bunch more.  "History of the tass Program". "The Mark III Camera 
System", etc..

We have just gone through an adventure here.  Possibly one of you can write 
a useful section.  I would call it "How to Find New Variable Stars in the 
Tass Data".  Or some such.  If you write it you get to title it.  We could 
probably use a couple of different versions of this, so feel free to write 
your version even if someone else is writing one.  I would cover finding 
techniques, (i.e. Welch-Stetson - but there are others), where you look in 
catalogs, how you reference the star to existing catalogs, what kind of 
follow up observations are called for, how to classify a new variable 
object (well you could write a book on this, but a few clues put in one 
place would be helpful). what you can deduce from just the raw tass data, 
coordinate transformations, color transformations, etc..  All the stuff we 
have been discussing the last several weeks.  I have someone else (guess 
who) writing a section called "How to write a paper on a new variable star 
found in the tass data" or some such title, so don't cover this.  But cover 
all the other stuff we have been doing.

Note that you don't have to be the person who has done the work to write 
the home page section.  Some people can write, some people can think and 
post.  The one who does the write up does a service just as the one who 
thinks clearly and posts does.  All is important to the end result.

Note that this note could mostly be done just by reading through the mail 
messages of the last several weeks, quoting them and summarizing them.  One 
should give credit where appropriate, but you don't have to so fill it with 
references that it is unreadable.  I would suggest a citation at the end 
which says something like the above includes e-mail excerpts from S. Jones, 
B. Smith, R, Brown and other active participants on the tass list.  Where 
you identify everyone possible.  I would lean toward making it readable 
over attributing every idea possible.   Experts might offer opinions on this.

Tom Droege