CASB Report for April, 2000

 

Highlights for Division Meeting.

·         The total number of entries in the COMPASS database now exceeds a billion!

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·          

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         Continuing to configure the new DB server.

·         Completed GEMINI employee performance evaluations.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         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.

 

NGST Guiding Studies

·         Alessandro Spagna visited for the month of April, working on the NGST Guide Star report.

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         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 Microdensitometer Systems

·         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.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         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.

 

Archive Maintenance

·         Completed archiving 15-micron scans of SERC-J plates.

 

Software Development

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

 

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing 

·         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.

 

COMPASS Database

·         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. 

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         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.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         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.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Apply_Calibs:

·         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.

 

GSC-II General Software Development

·         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.

 

GSC-II Science

·         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.           

 


 

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

 

SCANNING                                                                                                                                                                         

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

 

 

 

 

COMPRESSION

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

 

MO DISK ARCHIVING

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