>> Please expand on your thoughts below as far as the intended outcome >> (especially the second one)... There's continuing need for a sky patrol even at (or maybe especially at) bright magnitudes. The idea would be that the images---given lots of storage space and bandwidth---could be served as part of the "virtual observatory". The reason for suggesting stopping the lens down a bit is to sharpen up the images, sacrificing efficiency somewhat for precision. The better images would make astrometry and photometry better. Such a sky patrol would have come in handy for the bright lensing event in Cassiopeia a year or so ago, and even the current outburst of the bright dwarf nova in Pegasus, where _no_ observations were made between the first hint of the outburst noticed by European observers, and the much brighter state found by Japanese observers---not a single observer in North America caught it on the relevant night! \Brian -- See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please send personal replies to the author, not the list.