Murison developed a design for a new lens assembly at the back end of the dFTS. The purpose is to capture all the dispersed light from the diffraction grating within the dFTS bandpass (450-600 nm) and focus all — or at least most — of the point spread function energy within a 12-micron spot across the 2048 pixel dimension of the CCD detector. (The CCD pixels are 12 microns.) After analyzing many hundreds of variations, using Zemax, Murison arrived at a design built around two commercially available achromats, consisting of seven lenses (four custom lenses made of several different but not-expensive glass types, and three inexpensive lenses from commercial catalogs). Lens surface curvatures were kept as small as possible to improve throughput of the antireflection coatings. This has the added benefit of loosening manufacturing and alignment tolerances. RMS spot diameters of the final design are less than 5 microns across the bandpass.

Murison continued working on his derivation from first principles of the dependence of refraction in the Earth's atmosphere on temperature, pressure, humidity (TPH), as well as crude chemical makeup. This is in support of the USNO dFTS, which has obtained some very precise measurements of TPH which may lead to refinement of the parameters via nonlinear least squares. Murison helped supervise two dFTS summer students in working on this problem. Substantial progress was made on calculations in the Maple computer algebra and numerical calculation environment.

Murison's summer student finished his project on a method for making data from various AA department astronomical data products available via XML. The design is general, clean, and adaptable. We think this will be useful in future implementations of AA data products.

Murison spent many hours attempting (probably unsuccessfully) to comply completely with an onslaught of computer "security" measures. Many of these measures are obscure, others are clearly silly for an institution such as USNO, and still others are contradictory. Many will be a continuing impediment to daily mission work. Although USNO is required to comply, and hence we all have no choice in the matter, this nevertheless seemed largely (though not completely) a waste of everyone's time.

Murison notes for the record that the two large new signs (one at the South Gate and the other affixed to the front of Bldg. 56) are yet another significant blow to morale at "USNO".