The Amateur Sky Survey Mark III project

Michael Richmond
Thomas Droege
Glenn Gombert
Michael Gutzwiller

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2013. Data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. AMG acknowledges support from a NASA GSRP grant. Also archived in: arXiv:astro-ph/9910267 v1 14 Oct 1999

Abstract

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark III system, a set of wide-field drift-scan CCD cameras which monitor the celestial equator down to thirteenth magnitude in several passbands. We explain the methods by which images are gathered, processed, and reduced into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. Over the period October, 1996, to November, 1998, we compiled a large database of photometric measurements. One of our results is the tenxcat catalog, which contains measurements on the standard Johnson-Cousins system for 367,241 stars; it contains links to the light curves of these stars as well. (Refer to PDF file for exact formulas).