CASB Report for
April, 2000
·
The total
number of entries in the COMPASS database now exceeds a billion!
·
·
Continuing
to configure the new DB server.
·
Completed
GEMINI employee performance evaluations.
·
Six new
GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) were received this period. Four of the problems were fine lock failures
due to close binaries. Another GS was
fainter than expected possibly due to its proximity to the bright star Canopus,
leading to an overestimate of its brightness.
Bad GS Alerts were filed for each of these GSPRs. The sixth GSPR was
just received and is still under investigation.
·
Continuing
to work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, to be made available to STIS, ACS
and COS for cycle 10. Initial results
shown to Jerry Kriss and Claus Leitherer of the STIS team, who had only
positive feedback.
·
Received
the go-ahead to file an OPR to have a button installed on the CS's toolbox to
fire up the GUI. Waiting to learn the
priority assigned to the OPR and to hear about when it should be implemented.
·
Meanwhile, still collaborating with the ESS
group working on the Visual Target Tuner.
Receiving comments from both
CS’s and PI’s for improvements to the VTT GUI.
Concerns about Bright Objects are not limited to spacecraft safety, but
also include interference with the observations.
·
Alessandro
Spagna visited for the month of April, working on the NGST Guide Star report.
·
Continued
scanning POSSI-O plates between ROE shipments.
·
Scanning
slowed due to continuing GAMMA2 problems.
·
Returned
two plate shipments to ROE containing UKST-IR and AAO-SES plates. A large shipment from ROE is in transit.
·
GAMMA 1
continues to maintain nominal performance.
·
Hardware
testing to uncover the GAMMA 2 problems is continuing. A problem with positioning of the laser in
the laser monitor (photo diode used to measure high frequency laser intensity
fluctuations) detector was corrected. A
pixel counting problem still exists.
Results of more testing point to problems with either the servo box or
the pixel pulse gate. Tests are planned
to determine exactly which piece of equipment is malfunctioning.
· Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived. Meanwhile, compression of POSS-II N AAO-R and PPARC-ER plates continues.
·
Completed
archiving 15-micron scans of SERC-J plates.
·
No progress
reported in investigation of a GETIMAGE failure with the DSS-I, first reported
by the NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.
·
Processing
of the POSS-I red plates continues at a reduced pace.
·
Some minor
alterations were made to the processing script in order to eliminate some
unneeded tasks and to streamline production.
·
Production
Object-Matching has completed 1289 plates.
·
The
Apply_Calibs task has now applied the latest astrometric and photometric
calibrations to 1306 plates in the COMPASS Database.
·
There are
1.089 billion objects from plates loaded into COMPASS. A utility will be developed in the near term
to assess the number of unique sources detected from the completed set of
matched plates.
·
Cloned the
subset of the COMPASS production Federated Database (FDB) into a test
calibration FDB. This FDB will serve as
a testing ground for calibration development and QA utilities.
·
The CIQA
utility, an IDL interface to COMPASS was built and installed on COMPASS. It was successfully run in the interactive
mode on the local FDB server. There are
a few technical enhancements required for running this in production batch mode
for routine QA as well as remote access to the calibration FDB. This tool will be used to analyze the
quality of the GSC-2 catalog and systematic effects of the processing,
calibration, and classification production tasks.
·
Began to
perform some cleanup operations on the COMPASS database in recalibrating and
re- processing plates that had problems in either database activities or
processing errors.
·
Initial
testing of a pre-correction equation to correct for Schmidt plate distortions
looks promising. The use of this pre-correction improves the formal sigmas from
the plate solution. Masks using this
pre-correction are currently being made.
·
Wrote a validation
utility for training set files to perform a basic check on the data. Use of
this utility resulted in the identification and correction of two small bugs in
the XSPAM OOP access library that produced corrupt data when used with the IDL
classification marking utilities. This explained the poor results obtained by
all recent classification experiments.
CALIBRATIONS:
Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)
·
Beatrice
Bucciarelli visited for a week in April, working on GSPC-II testing and
publication.
·
Defined a
new plan for the catalog distribution that includes a full sky catalog with
(B)VR aperture photometry, instead of a limited equatorial distribution.
Currently, some QA tests are in progress.
·
It is also
part of the plan to have a duplicate database for all of the GSPC-II data
(images and files). Each night DLT copies are to be sent to OATo.
·
Built a
three-dimensional (x, y and magnitude range) mask correction from the KPNO VR
CCD photometry. Testing the reliability
of the mask is in progress.
·
Placed an
option in the develop version of Photosol that allows the user to have more
flexibility in selecting which colors (B-V) or (V-R) to use for the reference
stars. The default method uses the color closest to the bandpass of the plate.
·
Added a
field for magnitude errors to one of the pipeline files, to support future
experimentation with photometric calibrations.
·
Cleaned up
the output files (did, stat and anomaly), removing some un-important data and
also adding more numbers to better explain how the calibration performed.
·
Completed
testing and delivered a build of pipeline software including: ApplyCalib,
Deblender, Features, Findcat, Inventory, Photosol, and Plate_solution tasks;
the Rcat standalone catalog staging utility; several underlying software
libraries; and the XSPAM IDL user environment. This build corrected several
small bugs, and enhanced the catalog functionality for the GSPC2 and Tycho2
catalogs.
·
The
contents of this delivery were also provided to visiting collaborators at OATo
and ECF, for installation there.
·
Daniela
Carollo visited for three weeks in April, working on identifying high proper
motion halo white dwarf stars. She
presented a review of her work to CASB staff.
·
Morrison
submitted the paper, "The Guide Star Catalog, Version 1.2: An Astrometric
Re-calibration and Other Refinements," to the AJ.
·
Re-ran
eight plates near the south galactic pole with the newly delivered software and
the new GSPC II. Initial testing, using
these plates and comparing theoretical star counts to the computed star counts,
looks good. ‘
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
|
POSS-II
J |
897 |
898 |
0 |
898 |
100 |
|
1 |
|
POSS-II
F |
897 |
907 |
0 |
907 |
100 |
S4 |
1 |
|
POSS-II
N |
897 |
787 |
0 |
787 |
88 |
|
1 |
|
AAO-SES |
606 |
606 |
0 |
606 |
100 |
S4 |
1 |
|
PPARC-ER |
288 |
270 |
0 |
270 |
94 |
|
1 |
|
AAO-SR |
118 |
118 |
0 |
118 |
100 |
S2 |
- |
|
UKST-IR |
894 |
404 |
8 |
412 |
46 |
|
2 |
|
SERC-J/EJ |
447 |
443 |
0 |
443 |
99 |
S1 |
2 |
|
POSS-I
E |
106 |
106 |
0 |
106 |
100 |
S3 |
3 |
|
POSS-I
O |
880 |
86 |
29 |
115 |
13 |
|
3 |
|
Rescans |
|
18 |
0 |
18 |
|
|
|
|
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-II
J |
897 |
893 |
0 |
893 |
99 |
|
2 |
POSS-II
F |
897 |
877 |
0 |
877 |
98 |
|
1 |
POSS-II
N |
897 |
140 |
39 |
179 |
20 |
|
3 |
AAO SES |
606 |
572 |
0 |
572 |
94 |
|
1 |
PPARC ER |
288 |
245 |
0 |
245 |
85 |
|
1 |
UKST-IR |
894 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
3 |
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-II
J |
897 |
902 |
0 |
902 |
100 |
|
4 |
POSS-II
F |
897 |
878 |
0 |
878 |
98 |
|
3 |
POSS-II
N |
897 |
166 |
28 |
194 |
22 |
|
4 |
AAO-SES |
606 |
576 |
0 |
576 |
95 |
|
3 |
PPARC-ER |
288 |
250 |
0 |
250 |
87 |
|
3 |
AAO-SR |
109 |
0 |
0 |
73 |
67 |
|
4 |
UKST-IR |
894 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
|
5 |
SERC-J/EJ |
894 |
892 |
0 |
892 |
100 |
|
|
SERC-J/REPAIR |
48 |
48 |
0 |
48 |
100 |
|
|
SERC-J/15mu |
449 |
362 |
87 |
449 |
100 |
|
5 |
POSS-I
E |
933 |
928 |
0 |
928 |
99 |
|
2 |
POSS-I
REPAIR |
198 |
198 |
0 |
198 |
100 |
|
2 |
POSS-QV |
613 |
613 |
0 |
613 |
100 |
|
- |
SERC-QV |
94 |
94 |
0 |
94 |
100 |
|
- |
GPO/BB |
88 |
88 |
0 |
88 |
100 |
|
- |
GSC-II PLATE PROCESSING
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-I
E |
880 |
105 |
16 |
121 |
14 |
|
3 |
POSS-QV |
613 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
3 |
POSS-II
J |
897 |
887 |
0 |
887 |
99 |
G1 |
1 |
POSS-II
F |
897 |
897 |
0 |
897 |
100 |
|
1 |
POSS-II
N |
897 |
44 |
0 |
44 |
5 |
|
4 |
SERC-J/EJ |
894 |
822 |
0 |
822 |
92 |
|
1 |
South-F |
894 |
815 |
0 |
815 |
91 |
|
1 |
UKST-IR |
894 |
2 |
0 |
2 |
0 |
|
4 |
South-SR |
118 |
110 |
0 |
110 |
93 |
|
2 |
South-QV |
94 |
94 |
0 |
94 |
100 |
|
2 |
GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 1,089,000,000)
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-I
E |
880 |
5 |
0 |
5 |
1 |
|
3 |
POSS-QV |
613 |
0 |
3 |
3 |
0 |
|
3 |
POSS-II
J |
897 |
510 |
1 |
511 |
57 |
|
1 |
POSS-II
F |
897 |
743 |
0 |
743 |
83 |
|
1 |
POSS-II
N |
897 |
3 |
1 |
4 |
0 |
|
4 |
SERC-J |
894 |
128 |
0 |
128 |
14 |
|
1 |
South-F |
894 |
473 |
0 |
473 |
53 |
|
1 |
UKST-IR |
894 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
4 |
South-SR |
109 |
13 |
0 |
13 |
12 |
|
2 |
South-QV |
94 |
57 |
0 |
57 |
61 |
|
2 |
GSC-II Dataset for V2.1.1 delivery (1791
Fields, 3438 plates) (P1)
Item |
Count |
% done |
Notes |
Plates available |
3417 |
99 |
|
Plates
processed |
3355 |
98 |
|
DB
Load |
1907 |
55 |
|
Current
Calibration or Recalibration |
1887 |
55 |
|
GSPC-II OBSERVATIONS
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-I |
584 |
559 |
0 |
559 |
96 |
P1 |
1 |
POSS-II |
314 |
169 |
0 |
169 |
54 |
|
1 |
SERC |
894 |
868 |
0 |
868 |
97 |
|
1 |
GSPC-II REDUCTIONS
Survey |
Goal |
Previous Month |
Current Month |
Current Total |
% done |
Notes
|
Priority |
POSS-I |
584 |
559 |
0 |
559 |
99 |
P1 |
1 |
POSS-II |
314 |
169 |
0 |
169 |
54 |
|
1 |
SERC |
894 |
868 |
0 |
868 |
97 |
|
1 |