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Re: My Birthday Present
Didn't you say that you used to work @FermiLab? Are you still in Illinois, &
is that where these cameras are running from?
Didn't you also speak about all these complicated engineering problems
@Fermilab..some getting solved at the last minute. Did you ever work with
Melissa Franklin (I think she had a major hand in the CDF, which was used in
the discovery of the Top Quark)? Is the CDF pretty much digital circuitry,
or did it involve a lot of analog stuff. Are Experimental Particle
Physicists primarily engineers, designing & building instruments to get
physics data?
Burton Richter (SLAC, Nobel Laureate) had a pretty good quote on "From
Student to Scientist" (bunch of Nobel Laureates, incl Leon Lederman):
"it took 2 years to get the instruments working..it took 2 days to get the
results [ led to Nobel Prize ]"
How do you view this TASS vs Fermilab, is it just a miniature version? Is
TASS just a loose-bunch of people (kinda like Burt Ruttan/Scaled Composites,
who were tagged as "Bunch of Renegades"..who were hurting for funding, but
rich in Knowledge & Experience & Spirit), sort of a grass roots effort.
You mention David Charbonneau at a meeting, where you caught his attention
when you brought up TASS. He used to be post-doc @Caltech (I'm just a block
away, unfortunately I never got a chance to meet him while he was here..he's
back at Harvard), where he setup some stuff @Palomar. One of his Harvard
students came on an amateur list, querying about the Takahashi BRC-250..a
flat field Ritchey-Chretien. When he was @Caltech, he was using a Leica
300mm/2 (or was it 2.8) lens. Is TASS just an amateur copy-cat of
professionals like Charbonneau, or can it really do something unique?
Is there any official infrastructure to TASS, or is it just this Mailing
List. I'm doing this, you're doing this, & it's all kinda random scatter?
BY
droege@snapmail.us wrote:
> Last night was the first good run where I was able to track a field for a
> bunch (39) of exposures. The I camera was stopped down to 3", the V
> camera was wide open.
>
> The plots are for one set of 39 (one was bad or there would have been 40)
> 100 second exposures.
>
> As you can see, the noise floor is about 0.01 mag for both cameras. My
> plat is to stop down the I camera (so the sky noise is not so high) and
> run a longer exposure. Probably 200 seconds. This will give about 25
> frames in the time I can track.
>
> OK, this just hides the problems due to position in the frame. I plan to
> take data for standard tiles. There will be overlap regions and the
> values will probably not match in the overlap regions. This is a reason
> for always reporting stars by tile. This is a complication, but what can
> you do? Most will like the way the data looks much better. It will be
> left to the user of the data to figure out how he wants to calibrate this.
>
> I am not fixed on stopping down the I camera. Different exposures would
> do the same thing. But if I don't do something the I camera will saturate
> with long exposure.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Tom Droege
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Name: i.png
> i.png Type: PNG image file (image/png)
> Encoding: base64
>
> Name: v.png
> v.png Type: PNG image file (image/png)
> Encoding: base64
droege@snapmail.us wrote:
> Last night was the first good run where I was able to track a field for a
> bunch (39) of exposures. The I camera was stopped down to 3", the V
> camera was wide open.
>
> The plots are for one set of 39 (one was bad or there would have been 40)
> 100 second exposures.
>
> As you can see, the noise floor is about 0.01 mag for both cameras. My
> plat is to stop down the I camera (so the sky noise is not so high) and
> run a longer exposure. Probably 200 seconds. This will give about 25
> frames in the time I can track.
>
> OK, this just hides the problems due to position in the frame. I plan to
> take data for standard tiles. There will be overlap regions and the
> values will probably not match in the overlap regions. This is a reason
> for always reporting stars by tile. This is a complication, but what can
> you do? Most will like the way the data looks much better. It will be
> left to the user of the data to figure out how he wants to calibrate this.
>
> I am not fixed on stopping down the I camera. Different exposures would
> do the same thing. But if I don't do something the I camera will saturate
> with long exposure.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Tom Droege
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Name: i.png
> i.png Type: PNG image file (image/png)
> Encoding: base64
>
> Name: v.png
> v.png Type: PNG image file (image/png)
> Encoding: base64