The SMSP (Stupendous Man Scan Plan) was suggested by Michael Richmond in late February, 1997. He wanted to gather as much information as possible from two small fields in the sky, from all TASS sites, in order to put together a presentation at the June, 1997, AAS meeting.
You can read Michael's original message on the SMSP.
The idea is to gather data on the following fields until the end of March, 1997:
Field A: RA = 12:30 - 12:45 Dec = +0 (high latitude, ecliptic)
Field B: RA = 08:45 - 09:00 Dec = +0 (low latitude)
Field C: RA = 16:30 - 16:45 Dec = +0 (remains visible for months)
Arne Hendon has very kindly supplied photometry for a large sample of stars in some of the fields, in the standard BVRI passbands. Look at Arne's catalogs. Arne has also worked on making a master star list for each of the fields, based (as of May 12, 1997) largely on Michael Gutzwiller's photometry.
Arne has calculate the the mean color transformation coefficients to take raw TASS V and I data into the standard Johnson-Cousins system.
Below are sets of star lists provided by TASS observers:
The names of Mike's files give the date and rough time of each image: the final 8 characters, in the form DDDD.ddd, given the Julian Date of the exposure, via the equation Julian Date = 2,450,000 + DDDD.ddd. You can read about the format of the star lists. Arne Henden notes that Mike's cameras pick up the declination range +0 to -3 degrees.
Field "A"
Field "B"
Field "C"
Tom used Mike Gutzwiller's software to produce these data from the raw images, so the format and naming conventions are the same as Mike Gutzwiller's star lists. Tom notes that his cameras have declination ranges
Camera Zero +.60 to -2.28 I filter Camera One +1.41 to -1.39 V filter Camera Two +1.23 to -1.46 I filter
Please read Tom's message of Apr 23, 1997 and Tom's message of Apr 26, 1997 regarding some of his data listed below.
Weather reports (for some, but not all, nights):
Michael Richmond re-organized these files on May 12, 1997; they now have the Henden naming convention, and are no longer listed separately for each day.
Glenn used the SExtractor package to extract star lists from his images, taken in Dayton, Ohio. He used a fixed aperture of radius 5 pixels (for the Apr 8 data, at least). All images are rotated by -90 degrees before generating star lists, so that the order of the coordinates is (col, row) instead of (row, col).
Michael Richmond acquired images using TASS triplet #2 in East Braintree, Vermont. He used the XVista package to reduce and analyze the data. Michael uses aperture photometry to measure the brightness of each star, then sets the zero point using observations of Landolt standards within one hour or so of each observation. The file names below have the naming convention (suggested by Henden) of ddddxxxS.dat, where 'ddddxxx' is the Julian Date - 2450000 (the integer part in 'dddd' and fractional date in 'xxx') and 'S' is a code denoting the camera: 'G' for West I-band, 'H' for South V-band and 'I' for East I-band.
Each data file has three sets of magnitudes:
As mentioned on the TASS mailing list, Michael has found a systematic, declination-dependent bias in the photometry on Mar 08, 1997. He compared measurements against the mean magnitudes in Arne's master lists to remove the bias via a third-order polynomial, replacing the old measurements on May 12, 1997. The astrometry is good to 2-3 arcsec.