Mt. Pleasant Church, Conewago Township

About two miles south of McSherrystown and a similar distance southwest of Hanover, in Conewago Township, lies the small village of Mt. Pleasant. The community developed at and near the intersection of State Route 194, commonly called the Hanover-Littlestown Pike, and Legislative Route 01005, known in days past as the road from McSherrystown to Gitt\u27s Mill and its segment south of the intersection called in recent times Narrow Drive. In the eastern quadrant of the intersection, a church was built in 1878; nearby and adjacent to the crossroads sat a public school, which had been built sometime before 1858. The school was known by two names, Mt. Pleasant and Schwartz\u27s, and the village itself was also called by some people Schwartz\u27s or Schwartz\u27s Schoolhouse. Further, like the church, the school had religious significance to residents of the vicinity. [excerpt

March into Oblivion: A Footnote

In the above-titled work in 2006, this writer briefly discussed the possibility that President George Washington traversed present Adams County in October 1794, during his return from Bedford to Philadelphia, a belief long and widely held locally. No credible assertion of the President\u27s presence here in 1794 was possible at that time. Recently however, a forgotten narrative was rediscovered ; its author, Jacob Eyster, gives some substance to the previous mere speculation. After extensive research, this writer was graciously requested to produce a sequel to his prior speculative writing. [excerpt

March into Oblivion

The Whiskey Rebellion often is assigned, even by historians, to an obscurity which belies its significance. Its importance was major not only to the people most affected by its cause and those most intimately involved in the playing out of the events, but also to the young federal government, which had to demonstrate its authority yet not trample its own citizens. The situation held a very real potential for tearing apart the fragile nation. President George Washington felt strongly enough about it to involve himself personally in the beginnings of the military action. In the last few years of the century, rapid improvement in economics, safety, and foreign relations, surely spurred in part by the government\u27s reactions to the insurrection, underscored the importance to the nation as a whole. [excerpt

Slaveholders and Slaves of Adams County

A close study of the African-American community of Adams county waits to be written. By whatever standards adhered to, however, an in-depth investigation of the subject would be a daunting task at best, and in some areas an all but impossible one. Sadly, the early years, if seen at all, are often barely visible through the mists of repression and slavery. And yet, unfortunate and illogical as it might seem, slave owners very frequently offer the only glimpses of the downtrodden now obtainable.... This study consists of four lists, centered on the names of the county\u27s slaveholders and designed to look at slavery from different viewpoints. Included as an appendix is a collection of Pennsylvania laws, either the full texts or the pertinent portions, concerning slavery. Not only do those laws aid in understanding why the lists can now be compiled, but they are also in themselves a valuable history lesson on the state\u27s official view, for the years shown, of a sizable segment of its people. [excerpt

The Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System

We describe the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), a modern software package that produces automatic asteroid discoveries and identifications from catalogs of transient detections from next-generation astronomical survey telescopes. MOPS achieves > 99.5% efficiency in producing orbits from a synthetic but realistic population of asteroids whose measurements were simulated for a Pan-STARRS4-class telescope. Additionally, using a non-physical grid population, we demonstrate that MOPS can detect populations of currently unknown objects such as interstellar asteroids. MOPS has been adapted successfully to the prototype Pan-STARRS1 telescope despite differences in expected false detection rates, fill-factor loss and relatively sparse observing cadence compared to a hypothetical Pan-STARRS4 telescope and survey. MOPS remains >99.5% efficient at detecting objects on a single night but drops to 80% efficiency at producing orbits for objects detected on multiple nights. This loss is primarily due to configurable MOPS processing limits that are not yet tuned for the Pan-STARRS1 mission. The core MOPS software package is the product of more than 15 person-years of software development and incorporates countless additional years of effort in third-party software to perform lower-level functions such as spatial searching or orbit determination. We describe the high-level design of MOPS and essential subcomponents, the suitability of MOPS for other survey programs, and suggest a road map for future MOPS development.Comment: 57 Pages, 26 Figures, 13 Table

The main-belt comets: The Pan-STARRS1 perspective

We analyze 760475 observations of 333026 main-belt objects obtained by the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) survey telescope between 2012 May 20 and 2013 November 9, a period during which PS1 discovered two main-belt comets, P/2012 T1 (PANSTARRS) and P/2013 R3 (Catalina-PANSTARRS). PS1 comet detection procedures currently consist of the comparison of the point spread functions (PSFs) of moving objects to those of reference stars, and the flagging of objects that show anomalously large radial PSF widths. Based on the number of missed discovery opportunities among comets discovered by other observers, we estimate an upper limit comet discovery efficiency rate of ~70% for PS1. Additional analyses that could improve comet discovery yields in future surveys include linear PSF analysis, modeling of trailed stellar PSFs for comparison to trailed moving object PSFs, searches for azimuthally localized activity, comparison of point-source-optimized photometry to extended-source-optimized photometry, searches for photometric excesses in objects with known absolute magnitudes, and crowd-sourcing. Analysis of PS1 survey statistics indicates an expected fraction of 59 MBCs per 10^6 outer main-belt asteroids, and a 95% confidence upper limit of 96 MBCs per 10^6 outer main-belt asteroids. We note that more sensitive future surveys could detect many more MBCs than estimated here. We find an excess of high eccentricities (0.1 < e < 0.3) among all known MBCs relative to the background asteroid population. Theoretical calculations show that, given these eccentricities, the sublimation rate for a typical MBC is orders of magnitude larger at perihelion than at aphelion, providing a plausible physical explanation for the observed behavior of MBCs peaking in observed activity strength near perihelion.Comment: 38 pages, 14 figures; accepted for publication in Icaru