Aaron LaCluyze from the University of North Carolina has been down at CTIO for the past week, refurbishing the suite of PROMPT telescopes there. He was gracious enough to spend the last two days working on APASS-south. During this period, he cleaned the filters and camera entrance window for one of our telescopes; repaired the dew shield for the other telescope; installed new flat-field screens; installed a new microcontroller computer that handles the flat-field lamps; painted the edge of the u' filter to reduce the scattered light; and worked with Tom Smith to realign the cameras after they were removed. We hope that these changes will make APASS-south run smoothly for the next year!
Both APASS-south and APASS-north have had good weather, and we're making rapid progress towards completing the Primary Survey (2 images of every sky location). We still expect to have 99% of the sky covered at least twice by the time we release DR6 in mid-May.
As we head into the next bright-time period, we'll switch programs to monitor stars for various research projects, and start a pilot study of ugriz imaging of bright stars. We usually reserve 4-5 nights around full moon for such ancillary projects.
Arne