During May we collected 156 CD's of data. This has to be a record. Roughly 50 from each system with TOM3 on the short side. The month was spent struggling to get everything working. Mostly this succeed. TOM3 still has a noise problem. We will make a new cable and see if that does it. Each thing we do helps a little. Putting a filter on the chiller was the biggest improvement. The combined engineering and recent data is now close to 30 million measurement pairs.
This month we added a rain detector to the dome. It has worked and closes the dome when it rains. All we need is to work out communication over the network so that we can let everyone know when it is cloudy or when it is raining. Dan is itching to automate the coo coo clock mount for TOM1. We found a better memory card and this fixed part of the TOM3 problem. Now there is just the cable pick up noise to fix.
We have completed the processing of all the old data. It is on it's way to the data base as I type this. Data processing is now pretty much routine.
We have made a change in the procedure. We are now (as of May 30) saving the processed .fits files instead of the original. We think this is a small loss of original data in favor of being able to have more effective use of the nearly raw images for studying strange events.
We keep improving the home network. The big addition this month was an ADSL line. It was a struggle but now it seems to be working OK. One just has to attract the attention of the phone company and get across that you really want the line to work. Now we have to figure out how to let any of the computers access the internet. At present only Windows boxes see it. The switch boxes arrived an now I have one less monitor on my desk. There is more consolidation coming.