The Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) is currently undergoing a fundamental renaissance in its functionality and capabilities. Operationally, its fast delay line (FDL) infrastructure is completing its upgrade from a VME/VxWorks foundation to a modern PC/RTLinux core. The Classic beam combiner is being upgraded with the New Classic FPGA-based backend, and the VISION beam combiner has been upgraded over this past summer with low-noise EMCCD cameras, resulting in substantial gains in sensitivity. Building on those infrastructure improvements, substantial upgrades are also in progress. Three 1-meter PlaneWave CDK1000 telescopes are being delivered to the site, along with their relocatable enclosure-transporters, and stations are being commissioned for those telescopes with baselines ranging from 8 meters to 432 meters. Baseline-wavelength bootstrapping will be implemented on the facility back-end with a near-infrared beam combiner under development. Collectively, these improvements mark substantial progress in taking the facility towards realizing its full intrinsic potential.
We report progress on the United States Naval Observatory, Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer, Astrometric Catalog
(UNAC). This catalog uses observations from eight astrometric observation runs (Jan. 2005 - Nov. 2009) at the Navy
Prototype Optical Interferometer (NPOI). The goal of the first release of the UNAC is to provide an astrometric catalog
of at least 100 bright (V < 6) stars with precise positions accurate to < 16 milliarcseconds. In this paper we report on
some of the data processing methods used to obtain absolute astrometric positions from optical interferometer data. We
also discuss plans for assessing the accuracy of our interferometrically derived absolute astrometric positions.
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