• Completed processing and export of Coma field for SDSS observing run.
• Mike Meakes attended the annual NorthEast Astronomy Expo to represent the Astronomical Society of the Pacific who distribute the DSS and RealSky products.
• Gretchen Greene attended the annual WorldView conference for Objectivity developers.

• Antonio Volpicelli from OATo completed visit to work on COMPASS database QA.
• McLean visited OATo and ECF to review GSC-II and GSPC-II project status, allocate next work elements to each group, and develop publication guidelines. Annual GSC-II meeting will probably be held in Garching in November.
• Laidler visited OATo to install GSC-II software and provide training for pipeline production.
• David Wolfe has transferred from AURA/STScI to an AURA/GEMINI position.
• Wil O'Mullane visited from ESA/ESTEC to work on development of JAVA HTM interface.

• Investigated and filed Bad GS Alerts for two GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports). One of these was a finelock failure; the other was a search failure due to a misclassified galaxy in the GSC.

• Participated in the monthly NGSS Users meeting.

• Prepared moving-target charts and analyzed the adequacy of the GSC-I for STIS_BOP for dispersed mode observations of Comet Lee.
• Planned for GSC-II color data to support selected STIS observations.

• Planned next phase of study with GSFC staff.

• Received word that Palomar has completed the IIIaF survey. (IIIaJ already complete, IV-N has 108 fields remaining)
• Completed most of the scans of SERC-J plates needing rescans due to concern about laser monitor stability when the original scans were performed last summer.

• Started scanning latest shipment of plates from ROE. Received a shipment of short-exposure red plates from AAO. Sent a tape shipment of scans to CalTech.

• Performed routine maintenance on GAMMA-1. Test scans show nominal performance.

• J survey mastering continuing; hoping to complete production in June.

• Certification of MOD nearing completion.

• No progress reported in investigation of a GETIMAGE failure with the DSS-I, first reported by the NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.

• Defined a software build containing the most recent versions of all the calibration tasks, auxiliary calibration utilities, and newly built executables of all the pipeline processing tasks picking up the latest versions of the software libraries. Moved this build into the TEST environment and began testing, both here and at OATo. Several minor bugs and useful enhancements have been identified and fixed during this extended testing period.
• At STScI, continued GSC-II pipeline production pointing to the latest versions of the Photometry task (photosol) with excellent results. Among the most promising changes has been the inclusion of empirically determined data points at the plate limit to help in the extrapolated region. Runs on a number of plates show good results even for fields with less then ideal photometric sequences. A number of other tasks are also being tested with good results.
• Travelled to OATo for one week for work with our collaborators there. Major work activities on this trip included:
• installed latest software into the [casb.test] tree there for experiment and testing
• installed latest GSPC2 catalog
• conducted a number of status reviews, tutorials and practice sessions on the new software (including a session with R. Mignani, visiting OATo from ECF for two days that week)
• Discussed production-processing flow for CRA fields.
• Discussed GSPC2 naming, magnitude merging, final merged catalog contents.

• HSM software problems appear to have been resolved by the vendor. Further testing in progress to validate data integrity. Plate loading was halted until this problem was corrected.
• Continued work to enhance GSC-II export task. An index is being added to the FITS binary tables, which will now be sorted to HTM level 10 to speed up access times within the SKYCAT compatible access routines.

• New astrometric masks were created for XJ and XP plates. Apply_Calib on VMS and NT now can apply astrometric masks. The astrometric mask was applied to a set of test plates and overlapping positional plots were made. The swirls and much of the systematics have been greatly reduced, however, there still exist systematics that probably result from the magnitude effect or plate dependent systematics. Work has been done on testing and quantifying the position dependent magnitude effect.
• The sigma of the fit from plate_solution and the number of stars used in the calibration is now reported to the GSH file.

• The point and click mouse tool for manually marking classifications of objects has been finished and has been ported to Torino, along with the latest version of Classify. The new classifier, on VMS, which includes voting and averaging of ranks over neighboring regions, is being tested in preparation for moving to the base environment in late May or early April.

• Added a number of bug fixes and improvements to photosol. These include the addition of the faint "artificial" points to tie down the faint end of the calibration. Two new plots have been added to photosol (histogram of magnitudes and analysis of the reason a star is rejected
• Added an algorithm to Apply_calib to determine the astrometric and photometric errors. A detailed photometric algorithm has lead to an on - going study for the determination of some of the photometric error parameters. Apply_calib on NT was ported to VMS resulting on some modifications of the code to make the two versions as similar as possible.
• Vignetting masks have been determined in the density domain for 3 independent surveys: XJ, XP and XS. Now the work is oriented to finding the correct implementation.
• Fabrizia Guglielmetti and Amy Rosemberg have attended to a training session about how to work with ARLO and the plan is for them to work part-time reducing data during this summer.
• The Loneos catalog has been included in the GP2 catalog, improving some regions without GSPC-II stars.
• ESO data reductions performed for 10 nights.
• Successfully completed (6 nights out of 8) the La Palma JKT run (observer B. Massone).
• Obtained data from ESO 2.2m for vignetting experiment. Copying the data is being onto backup tapes to be sent to STScI.

• Favata and Hawkins presented a paper on the GSC II work on Blanco 1 in May at the conference on Stellar Clusters and Associations in Palermo, Italy. Recent work on Blanco 1 has included matching GSC II proper motions with stars common to the Yale Southern Proper Motion survey, and interpreting the results of matching X-ray detections with optical sources.
• Morrison attended the Division of Dynamical Astronomy (of AAS) and presented a poster paper entitled the "Status of the GSC II Catalog" with emphasis on the photometric and astrometric calibrations.
• Mignani outlined a project to derive Globular cluster CM diagrams from the GSC-II processing and showed some examples of this work. This could be a useful QA tool.
• Developed structure for CRA and non-CRA database at OATo. Flow chart of this strategy is reported in web page. Developed new manual classification procedure for the Extragalactic CRA proposals.

S1. Low priority program to rescan crowded fields (|b|<30) originally done with 25 mu scans. The total number of S scans includes the 2 for the LMC and SMC plus 4 others with |b|>30 performed for research or STIS BOP support.

S2. This survey is an on-going low level-of-effort collaboration between the ST ScI and the AAO. About 25-50 plates have been added in each of the past few years.

S3. Low priority scans of the POSS-I -24 deg and -30 deg zones.

S4. Includes recent scans of better grade plates.

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 758,880,625)