The Auger Star Monitor

The Auger Star Monitor (ASM) is designed to automatically measure the total vertical atmospheric extinction above the Auger Observatory. The system continually takes wide-field CCD images of the night sky through a Johnson U-Band filter. Photometry is performed on the star images. The change in recorded star brightness as a function of zenith angle is used to obtain values for the integrated density of atmospheric scattering components. The MTU group has installed two ASMs; one at the Southern Observatory atop the Los Leones Fluorescence Detector building and one at the future site of the Northern Observatory in Colorado. Both of these units have been routinely operating during the past year. Much of our effort has turned to developing better data-reduction algorithms and automated software. Significant work has done to perfect the algorithms for image processing, star identification and photometry. Partial results of extinction coefficients obtained by the ASM will be presented.