I should also comment... This same method of doing sweeps could be automated. It probably could be done by some real budding amateur with a small alt-azimuth refractor telescope with a 1 to 2-degree field, CCD camera with a really decent automated guide system with programmable up and down slewing along the north-south meridian - with a guiding system good enough for about 120 seconds.
It might be a bit of a bugger of a job to organise, but once figured out, you could very easily produce your very own southern sky star atlas / deep-sky atlas, within a year and a bit. Observations could only be over a dozen good nights in an entire year - whose only conclusion would be based naturally on the weather and the quality of the site.
Observations could be made along the meridian, with exposures of 1 to 2 minutes a pop (multi-wavelength would even be possible.) With so many IIS imagers here, hell, two or three similar telescopes scattered in differing latitudes might even be able to do it in short time, whose results
Image calibration could be done by a bright computer whizz
basically using only the free C.D.S.'s ALADIN, who could even write simple program software for automated reductions, and epoch adjustment for 2000.0, or any current (2010) or future epoch I.e. 2025 or 2050.
Best of all you could produce a photographic atlas / star catalogue, probably better than
Sky Catalogue 2000.0 or
Uranometria 2000.0, and would not have to curtail copyright limitations - only having to acknowledge the CDS software. (Once completed you could then do variable star observations or double stars measures forever and a day.)
Ummmm... Almost very tempted to do this myself...
"The Enchilada Star Atlas : 2010" (ESA) ??
....we have the technology and the manpower folks!
NOTE: Had Dunlop ever seen this, I think he would have either had a "fit of the vapours" or would need a few stiff drams of the ol' Scottish whiskey!!
