The IAPPP CCD conference at Lake Arrowhead was well attended with about 75 people present. Anyone not convinced of the usefulness of CCD's and computer control of telescopes by the talks over the day and a half of the presentations would have been thoroughly convinced by the demonstration put on by Steve Bisque of Bisque Software. In a span of 30 minutes he aligned and set the telescope drive, connected the Apogee CCD camera and began to locate and image galaxies including M82 with a bright Supernova in it. A really convincing demonstration of his software package The Sky and its telescope control capabilities.
Really interesting and informative sessions included a panel discussion with Wayne Brown of Apogee Instruments, Doug George of Cyanogen Productions and Arne Henden of the USNO Flagstaff. Dennis DiCicco of Sky & Telescope provided interesting commentary to the panel discussion.
In an interesting development, Ed Byers described his new drive design using a computer controlled tangent arm sector drive. Bob Bell reported on a test he performed on the drive and pronounced it without discernable error except for the tracking error caused by differential refraction in the atmosphere over the 20 or 30 minute test. (That sounds like a correction one could add in a short while with a short subroutine to the operating control system.) The drive operates up to 2 hours before having to be reset, which takes about 3 minutes. Ed also stated he was moving to Texas from Barstow and may discontinue his machine work. His drives are the world standard, and his retirement will create a huge gap in precision drive suppliers.
The program was as follows:
Wayne Brown : CCD Camera Technology
Douglas George: Image Processing With MaxIm DL Software
Bob Bell : Adaptive Optics of Amateurs
Mark Trueblood : Integrating Instrumentation and Telescope Control
Mike Rushford: A WWW Telescope Using LINUX"
Wayne Johnson : WWW Photometry of Recent Supernova
Arnie Henden: How To Do Precision CCD Photometry
Gary Frey: Photometry With Twin 20-Inch Telescopes
Leroy Snyder: Period Change in the Variable Star UV Leonis
Chet Schuler: How To Best Utilize the Filters You Select and Compensate for the Ones You Don't Have!
Gil Clark: The Telescopes In Education (TIE) Program
Steve Bisque: CCD Imaging: Past Present, and Future
John Hoot: Synthetic Filter Photometry For Small Aperture Telescopes
Bob Bell: Light Curve For An Eclipsing Binary
Edward Byers: An Astronomical Telescope Mount Without Periodic Error