Dear FIRPO friends, I have quickly looked at the data freshly sent by Bringfried after his run at the 1.23m in the current situation of "poor" (to say the least) mirror. I have measured the SNR on two stars: V Sp K(assumed) SNR ------------------------------- 7.9 K4/5 4.5? 7.3 9.1 K3 6.2? 3.0 It seems thus feasible to obtain curves with SNR~1 for stars close to K=7. For comparison, my experience from two seasons ago at the 1.23m was that the limit was K=7.5 for SNR=1. So at least for faint stars, it seems that the situation with the mirror does not preclude useful work. Whether this is due entirely to the fact that the noise is dominated by the lunar background only, or whether the detector is more sensitive now than it used to be 2 years ago, is not completely clear. Of course, I expect that it will be more difficult now to find the stars, and probably to do photometry. But at least for LO, I'm confident that things will work out well. Thanks to Bringfried for his work, and good luck to Christoph and Vanni for their coming run! Andrea