Getting There

[droege@snapmail.us]

Getting new software up and running is always a problem.  Finally last
night I got a few images that processed to data that makes sense to me.  A
log plot of mag vs sigma for a very small number of points is attached. 
As you can see, the sigma gets down to the vicinity of 0.01 mag for low
magnitudes.  For this data the tracking was still being adjusted so there
was a horizontal smear of about 3 pixels.

The tracking was later reduced to under 1 pixel per image, but the program
died as soon as I went to bed.  Sigh!

The plan is still to run tracking specific tiles in the sky for as long as
the particulay mount will track.  For TOM1, this is about 2 hours.  It
looks like I will be able to track tiles so that stars change position in
the image only a few percent in 2 hours.

As you all know, I think this just hides the problems.  But it does make
the data look better and it will be easier to find short period variables.

With Rob's new software, I will be able to automate tasks that used to
take me a lot of time and effort.  Thus I hope to operate 5 Mark IVs this
year with less effort than it took to run 4 last year.  Yeah!

Tom Droege

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