2008 September 12
And right now, I’m up at Hat Creek observing with the ATA. A lot have improvements have come into the system since I’ve last used it, and the differences are noticeable. The data that I’m getting look very good. I’ve updated my observing scripts to interact with all of the new systems and they seem to be taking data successfully.
I’ve planned out some real science observations for tonight. They should be able to run without intervention for the next twelve hours or so. In the meantime, I’ll be looking at the data that I’ve acquired so far and see what I need to do to successfully analyze it. I don’t think that I’ll need to alter how I obtain the data, but you never know.
So far, I’ve had a few tantalizing improvements in the quality of the information that I get out of the data. Unfortunately, the improvements are inconsistent, so I need to figure out why some of my data are better than others. I have a lot of time on my hands in which to do this, so hopefully I’ll make some progress.