I've run 15 southern nights through the entire pipeline as an initial test, and the results look great. The better weather at CTIO sure helps! There will be about 55 nights in the 2nd data release, so it will take a few more days to finish the processing. The 15 nights had 1.4 million stars, so DR2 should have about 5 million new stars in it, all from the south. The better image quality in the south (primarily due to better collimation) has moved the magnitude range a bit fainter: we saturate about V=10.5 and cut off about V=17.
Last night was the first partly cloudy night at CTIO since November 6. Amazing! We've added the -20 to -40 declination range to the survey, as we've covered all of the fields visible this time of year that are south of that. Everything continues to run smoothly; we now have automated open/close, so the system can be set up with new fields to image during daytime and then it runs by itself at night.
We've started to take data in the north, though the weather continues to be problematic. I haven't looked at it carefully, as I've been devoting my free time to DR2. However, APASS-south runs so well that I will soon be able to pay more attention to getting the new northern astrographs running.
Arne