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.