Status Report for November, 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

November was spent getting ready for serious running.  Therefore no data 
disk count is meaningful.  There are data disks everywhere with various 
test runs on them.

The new declination drive was installed on all three systems and has been 
thoroughly tested on TOM1.  It performs as expected, so TOM1 is now set up 
to take data on mod 4 degree centers starting at 0,0.  The present program 
runs from -4 to +12 declination in 4 degree steps.   It is like running a 
Mark III except the field is 20 degrees wide and can be run at any 
declination.  I am routinely processing the -6 to +14 degree data through 
the pipeline after Michael R. cured several problems.  When the weather 
clears I expect to start TOM2 and 3 on the same program and cover from -6 
to +60 or so.  There are 20 disks in the stack covering 5 nights of running 
with TOM1 so far.

The focus does not work very well because the trombone cants and wants to 
stick.  I have designed some stiffening parts and they went into the mail 
to the machine shop yesterday.  If this cures the focus problem, then I am 
going to declare that the Mark IV is done.  Meanwhile, I spray WD-40 on the 
trombone parts when I want to focus.

Michael Sallman now has the big data file available on line.  He continues 
to make improvements to the access tool.

There is a question as to whether stopping down the I camera is a good 
idea.  We shall see.  We have taken data such that a star appears in 7x7 
positions on the CD.  This to investigate the problem that we got different 
magnitudes in the data where a star moves across the image.  It is obvious 
that there is a systematic error in the magnitude which depends on the 
position in the frame.  It appears that this is quite repeatable.  There is 
hope that a correction derived from the 7x7 data will improve the accuracy.

Dan survived the marriage ceremony, which is all one can ask.

Tom Droege