  Mid-infrared (MIR) observations are typically accomplished from the ground
through oscillating the secondary mirror a few times a second. This chopping
serves to remove the fast time variable components of (a) sky variation and (b)
array background. However, there is a significant price to pay for this,
including reduced on-object photon collection time, stringent demands on the
secondary mirror, nodding the telescope to remove the radiative offset
imprinted by the chopping, and an often-fixed chop-frequency regardless of the
sky conditions in the actual observations. Worse, in the era of 30m telescopes
it is wholly impracticable to chop the secondary mirror. If the array is stable
enough, drift scanning holds the promise to remove the necessity of chopping.
In this paper we report our experiments using the CanariCam MIR instrument on
the 10.4m GranTeCan and the implications to future instruments and experiments.
