August Going Great

[Thomas Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

August is going great.  I have data for 4 of the first 5 days, and it looks
good again tonight.  Several times the system hung when it saw the moon. 
Other than that (and the effect of moonlight) there were no problems. 
About 3 million pairs so far and the moon is just beginning to go away. 

August, September and October seem to be the good months here.  It is easy
to see when viewing is good by looking at the stacks of CDs on my desk. 
The weather pattern shifts just a little and suddenly we get strings of
clear nights.  This means we will have half our area with good coverage and
half with not so good.  That is astronomy when you can't move the telescope
very far from the meridian.  So we get what we can, and others can fill it
in later if it seems valuable to do so.   Still, we are getting a lot of
data.   By now we have at least 1 VI pair for the northern sky to -6
degrees and mag 13 or so.  Many large areas have 20-40 measurement pairs.  

Tom  Droege
tdroege2@earthlink.net