Progress

[droege@snapmail.us]

Things went well today but not too well.

I was able to get data taken over the last several days on TOM1 through
the pipeline.  I got down to the point of trying to calibrate the RA speed
which was drifting at about .4 degree per hour.  I discovered that the RA
trim DAC was not working.  It did not fix quickly.  So one more item on
the list to work on.

The data was taken with the telescope tracking specified integral 4 degree
fields.  I plan to run this way for the next season.  So we will hide the
errors caused by viewing a star in different positions in the frame by
always measuring a star in the same position.  The tracking did a fair job
and the stars moved only a fraction of a degree during each 30 frame run.
My guess is that I should be able to take a run as long as I can track
(about 2.5 hours with TOM1) and keep a star within 0.1 or so degree.

I really expected the spread to be small as it has been on previous runs
of this type.  Instead it was awful.  One run had spread that was much
larger at lower magnitudes.

OK, one thing, the runs had very few stars.  While it looked clear to me
(I really can't tell) there were as few as 20 to 100 stars in a .clt file.
 Usually there is at least 1000.  So there must have been uniform haze or
high thin cloud cover or the cloud detection software would have discarded
frames.  Lots of things to be sorted out.  OK, good enough for a first
run.

With Rob's new software, I will be able to turn on in the afternoon, and
not look until the following afternoon to see the results.  Upward and
onward.

Tom Droege