Re: Sad news

[Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net>]

Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 02:49:40 +0000 (GMT)
From: Martin Nicholson <martin_piers_nicholson@yahoo.co.uk>
To: Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net>
Subject: Re: Sad news

I will miss Tom's contribution to amateur astronomy. He reintroduced me to the hobby after I had been in the scientific wilderness for nearly a decade and his passing means that both my astronomical mentors have died within a period of a month.

   Rest in Peace Tom.


Tass Mailing List <tass@mail.alembic.net> wrote:

Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:55:31 -0500
From: Michael Richmond
To: tass@tass-survey.org
Cc: mwrsps@rit.edu
Subject: Sad news


Tom Droege passed away two days ago, after fighting against
cancer for several years.

Tom founded TASS way back in 1994, when he was intrigued by the idea
of using his electronics skills to take pictures of the sky. His first
attempt, the TASS Mark I, was based on a one-dimensional FAX scanning
chip. Over the next five years, he built more sophisticated devices:
the Mark III systems, for example, were designed around triplets of
camera lenses, focusing light on three CCDs and operating in drift-scanning
mode. They were used by a number of observers to generate a photometric
catalog of 367,241 stars around the celestial equator. In 1999, he
finished the first Mark IV systems, each of which has two large custom-built
refracting telescopes making simultaneous measurements in two passbands.
Tom set up three of the Mark IV systems on the roof of his house in
Batavia, Illinois, and ran them on every clear night. His many years
of hard work led to a photometric catalog of the entire northern sky,
containing over one hundred million measurements.

Of course, Tom didn't view this as "hard work" -- for him, it was
both fun and intriguing. He wrote a little essay on "How to play the
TASS game" which includes this quotation:

"Many of you have spent hundreds of hours playing Zork or
Adventure. I did, and on an ASR-33. With a similar effort
you can play 'tass'. The result may be much more satisfying
than finding the paper gold or diamonds. You will discover
a real scientific result ..."

For Tom, TASS was a game -- one of the most interesting games in the
world. He spent years enjoying himself, building cameras, solving puzzles,
and adding to the astronomical community's collective knowledge.
I can only hope that I may have as much fun playing the science game
as Tom did.

Michael Richmond




Martin Nicholson - Daventry, England

ASTRONOMICAL PROJECTS - Variable stars, double stars, astro imaging
http://www.martin-nicholson.info/1/1a.htm

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