RE: Focus indication

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Arne and all,

While the system is supposed to be automatic, sometimes things go wrong 
during the run.  I turn on at dusk and run till dawn.  As you know, I have 
lots of beeps in the program.  I have awoken at 2 AM after noticing a 
change in the pattern of the beeps.  This to find that the RA drive was 
broken and was not moving, for example.

The next thing I will ask for from Rob is some alarms.  OK, most of the 
time I will not want to run up to the roof in my nightshirt and rebuild the 
RA drive.  But if the stars disappear, then I may want to go up and shut 
the doors, because the next thing to happen might be rain.

Arne, with the little that I watched you work, it seems that you are mostly 
doing things.  Taking images and looking at them while taking the next 
one.  Just because we will turn on at dusk and run a canned program till 
dawn does not mean that we do not want to watch what is going on.  I want 
to program that does that, and which can be alarmed to flag problems.  This 
is what Rob is working on.

Possibly focus will be too hard to do on the fly.  Note that I have all 
possible problems.  The rest of you will have fewer problems because I have 
lived with all the junk and fixed it.  Focus is something still on my 
list.  Eventually it may go to the non problem stack.  But at the moment, I 
am still investigating possible focus problems.

Tom Droege



At 11:46 AM 6/13/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Ah, what one will do to get their hands on a Mark IV!
>The reason I asked is that the system is supposed to
>be automatic and therefore no real-time display is
>necessary.  FWHM is much easier calculated during
>the pipeline processing, and focus is much easier to
>obtain from visual inspection of a 'focus plate'.
>Tom must have his reasons.
>Arne