Edited by Peter Lawson
Phone
Book | Links
| Home
Editorial: 9 December 1999
Peter R. Lawson.
9 December 1999
News from the CHARA Array
First fringes at the CHARA Array were obtained on Tuesday, 23 November 1999.
Examples of fringes, a group photograph of the CHARA team, and the
Press Release can be found elsewhere on the pages of OLBIN at
http://huey.jpl.nasa.gov/olbin/news/chara/Cma.html.
These fringes should pave the way for the funding of the sixth telescope
as per an agreement with the Keck Foundation.
The group at the CHARA Array are commencing astronomical observations with
the existing baseline, in particular the measurement of a stellar diameter,
and the orbit of a binary star - in preparation for the AAS meeting in
Atlanta which is being hosted by CHARA.
News from the VLTI
The September 1999 issue of the ESO Messenger (No. 97) contains two articles describing progress with the
VLTI. The first article (p. 11) discusses progress with the deformable secondary mirror
of the VLTI delay lines, and the second article (p. 12)
shows starlight testing of the
siderostats that will precede the auxilliary telescopes. The first
two siderostats have undergone tests in Germany and are
to be installed at Paranal in early 2000.
News from PTI
PTI will be closing down for the season on December 15th. The weather
at the Palomar Observatory is so miserable over the winter that it has
become a normal part of operations to close the interferometer before
Christmas, remove and recoat its optics, and re-install and realign
the optics for renewed operations at the beginning of March. The West
siderostat has not yet been put into routine use. Over the course of
this winter it will be fully equipped with dual-star optics for operation
in the 2000 season. The 1999 astrophysical results from PTI will be presented
at the AAS meeting in Atlanta in January 2000. A paper describing the
experimental narrow-angle astrometric performance of PTI is currently
in preparation.
Michelson Summer School August 1999
My involvement with the Michelson Summer School is likely to continue into
future years and possibly become a fixed part of my work at JPL.
I am currently in the process of editing the course notes for the school -
which are still far from complete - and hope to have that done early in
the new year.
- The video tapes of the lectures are now all available on real-video
courtesy of NASA Ames.
- Most of the viewgraphs that accompany the video lectures are available.
There remain about 10 sets of viewgraphs that have yet to be
converted to PDF format. These will be converted in time, but
the conversion process is labour intensive and currently
there is no-one devoting time to this task. I will however
respond to complaints or suggestions if specific viewgraphs are
requested.
- I made a start at asigning names to the
group photo. Please
click on the photo for an expanded version and contact
me with any additional names.
- The course notes are currently occupying all the time I have set
aside for the Summer School, so please excuse the slow progress
on other aspects of the school.
- Plans are being made for the 2000 Summer School to be held in
Flagstaff, pending a date to be set by Ken Johnston. Unlike the
Summer School held in Pasadena this year, which emphasized the
engineering of stellar interferometers, the Flagstaff Summer
School will emphasize astrophysics and data reduction.
Link verification at OLBIN
I spent some time during the past week working on a method of automated
link verification for OLBIN. There are about 563 links spread throughout
the web pages of OLBIN, and I've become increasingly aware that it would
be impossible for me to verify all the links through random checks or
even the occasional use of DrHTML.
I have implemented a script that strips all the http addresses from OLBIN,
and calls wwwget for each site, greps the status line to a file and then
composes an html log of the results. wwwget is a commonly available
Perl Script, whose existance was pointed out to me by Daniel Egret at
AstroWeb (CDS). The verification process I use involves a Unix Shell script, a Perl script,
and a C program. It's not elegant, but it seems to work well.
The current run of the log can be seen at http://huey.jpl.nasa.gov/olbin/errors/.
Astroweb at NRAO seem to use an enormous suit of Tcl scripts that drives a search
engine at Hotbot and automatically emails the owners of offending web pages.
I have no intention of devoting that much time to systematize the pages of
OLBIN, and so I have to run the scripts by hand and work through the
errors as time permits.
Peter Lawson
December 9, 1999
Maintained by Peter Lawson
MS 306-388
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109
USA
