• Four CASB staff members participated in this year’s very productive GSC-II meeting.

• Garcia, Greene, McLean, and Morrison attended the annual GSC-II meeting in Garching, Oct 25-26.The meeting was also attended by representatives from ESA, ESO, ST-ECF, OATo, and the Gemini Project.

• Highlights of the annual GSC-II meeting included:

• Excellent progress was reported on general plate processing and on the infrastructure for further processing and database population.

• The schedule and available capabilities for the future deliveries of GSC-II were presented and accepted.

• Agreement was also reached on the content and formats for the export version(s) of GSC-II.

• Investigated 16 GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) this period. Eleven of the GSPRs involved fine lock or loss-of-lock problems due to close binaries. The other five were dimmer than expected, leading to various acquisition problems. Two of the latter appear to be multiple stars in the DSS misclassifed as single stars with overestimated brightness in the GSC. Filed Bad GS Alerts for all 16 objects.

• Participated in a STIS-BOP meeting where it was decided to incorporate the Sky 2000 Catalog into the NGSS to ensure completeness in bright object coverage down to 8^th magnitude.
• Supported a request for charts and tables for STIS-BOP evaluation of windows for Jupiter observa- tions.

• Completed scanning the fifth shipment of UKST-IR plates. Also scanned POSSI-O plates needed for science programs and rescanned SERC-J plates where the original scans required repair before they were included in DSS-I.
• Received the sixth shipment of UKST-IR plates from ROE and sent a large shipment of POSS-II plates to CalTech.

• Began a plate archive inventory. CASB has accumulated a large plate archive over the years and it has been some time since we inventoried our permanent collection.

• Both scanning machines performed nominally during the month.

• Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived.
• Continued to adjust compression methods for the POSSII-N survey. Started to organize CDROM's for production.

• Premastered a new volume 39 of the DQVS (POSS-QV survey) used for HST Phase-II support. This was required by the discovery that the wrong plate scan was on this disk. The correct scan of region N627 has been substituted. The new volume is done and will be replaced in the jukeboxes for the Cycle 9 phase-II.

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

• Created an Excel workbook for tracking the processing status of all scans. Using perl scripts, initially loaded the workbook with the contents of the PSI, the processing status of scans sent to Garching, and the status of scans loaded into COMPASS. The workbook was further modified to automatically compute useful tracking statistics. A small suite of Perl subroutines was written for use in automatically updating the workbook as processing continues. Additional fields will be added to show more detailed COMPASS processing status, to be obtained directly from the database.
• Using the above workbook, further refined the list of GSC2.1 scans, identified plates that need rescanning, as well as a set of scans that should be deleted from COMPASS for GSC2.1.

• Continued full-script plate processing covering plates mostly from the SERC J survey and the SES short exposure galactic plane survey, plus a few POSSII -J plates.

• Continued photometric recalibration along with COMPASS database loading of previously processed data. Over 100 plates reprocessed and released to the database during the month. This rate is expected to grow rapidly in coming months.

• Continued to streamline the processing scripts for this task to improve efficiency and accuracy in this massive data-handling project.

• OTG HSM system was rebuilt and configuration of the extended drives is in process. The plate processed "OOP" files, are being stored offline in the DLT jukebox in the HSM system.

• Completed JAVA visualization tool, ShowSky (a temporary name) which is an image browser and catalog access tool. It accesses GSC-2, Tycho, and Hipparcos catalogues via http as well as the STScI DSS image-server. It also has classification filters and proper motion analysis tools.

• All maintenance licenses for Objectivity were renewed.
• A preliminary Proper Motion task was written and exercised on a small set of fields in COMPASS. This is a first order linear approximation based on non-optimal astrometry intended only for exercising the multi-plate schema operations and providing input to the JAVA visualization of GSC-2.
• Administrative tool for defragmenting databases was developed in perl and run on COMPASS. It was able to reclaim 50% disk capacity for severely fragmented files.
• WWW pages have been enhanced for COMPASS. A GSC-II page has been initiated.
• GEMINI is currently working with the export catalog and reporting acceptable findings.
• The object-matching production is scheduled to restart in November following the annual GSC-II meeting. This task is critical, but in its present production form is very expensive in time. We are currently reviewing available options for improving performance.

• No activity while Jane Morrison was on maternity leave.

• Identified an output conversion error problem in FINDCAT that prevents calibration tasks from running. This bug only occurs when previously applied photometric calibrations have been significantly incorrect. Created a standalone utility to overwrite such extremely wrong magnitudes in the OOP file with a null value which will not overflow the MCO field, and update the processing status flag to reflect no magnitude for the object.

• Created an XSPAM utility to compute the XY (pixel) locations of the corners of overlapping plates in the reference frame of a scan, using GSH files. This utility will support science with overlapping plates on the VMS side.

• Over 88% of the requested scan images have been sent to OATo.
• All of the recently request scan images have been sent to ECF.

in DSS-I.

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 = 842616131)