CASB Report for February, 2000

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         Scan production has increased to better than 20 scans per week.

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         McLean attended NVO meeting in Tucson

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         Consulting agreement with Wil O'Mullane was issued for continued development of JAVA user interface to the GSC-2 export catalogue and COMPASS.

·         Fabrizia Guglielmetti has completed her training in plate scanning and is contributing to this task on a routine basis.

·         Tonnia Lewis has left STScI for a position with AT&T.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Received two new GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) this period.  These GSPRs document Fine Lock Walk Down failures.  Bad GS Alerts were filed for three GSPRs, including one from the last period.

·         Continued to work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, which will be available for STIS, ACS and COS, in cycle 10. Began working with Tony Krueger in the ESS Division to develop the Visual Target Tuner, a component of the Astronomer's Proposal Tool, which will be used in writing HST programs.   The VTT code may also be used in the BOP GUI.

 

NGST Guiding Studies

·         Planning visit of Alessandro Spagna to STScI during April to continue consulting work on this activity.

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         Completed scanning the 7th shipment of UKST-IR plates.  Resumed scanning the POSSI-O plates.

·         With four operators now available and both GAMMAs functioning successfully, scanned 82 plates this period, a current rate of better than 20 scans per week.

·         Returned two shipments of UKST-IR plates to ROE; just received the 8th shipment of these plates.

 

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         GAMMA1 has shown some indication of a slight deterioration in mechanical performance, which would indicate that maintenance would be needed.  The performance is still within acceptable limits.

·         A photometric test performed on GAMMA1 shows good photometric performance with respect to the POSSI-O plates currently being scanned.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final J plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived.  Meanwhile, compression of POSSII-N plates continues.

 

Archive Maintenance

·         Recycled the remaining miscellaneous nine-track archive tapes and reorganized some of the 9-mm tapes to provide more office space in N112c.

 

Software Development

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

·         Discussed possibility of putting entire DSS onto hard disk instead of DVD. Costs are now comparable and would simplify maintenance efforts.

 

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing

·         Fewer than twenty plates in COMPASS remain to be recalibrated.

·         Tests of the apply calibrations task and a loading script to transfer recalibrated header files to the NT side were both successful.  Larger scale testing is planned for the first week of March.  An automated processing script will be constructed to interface with the Apply_Calib task.

·         Applying the photometric recalibrations to COMPASS data should begin in production shortly.  It is hoped that recalibration of the sparse, high latitude regions can be completed in a few weeks.  The crowded regions could extend this time significantly, but lack of experience in these regions precludes an accurate estimate of the time needed.

·         A small number of POSSI-E plates have been processed recently.  Testing and process optimization continues at a reduced pace.  Full scale processing should begin within the next month.

 

 

COMPASS Database

 

·         Production Object-Matching has completed approximately 1200 plates and is continuing to run on remaining loaded plates.  Load operations are on hold until all plates currently in COMPASS are matched and have the latest calibrations applied.

·         Several software database utilities were developed and implemented for QA and production operations for COMPASS catalog production.  A Users Guide for these utilities was initiated and kept online with the utilities.  These utilities include plate container object counts, finding preloaded plates database regions (for hardware configuration control), COMPASS plate status (listing, loaded, matched, stage of calibration).

·         Patches to the recent Objectivity version 5.2 upgrade will be put in place to correct memory leaks in the database kernel.

·         Apply_Calib production on COMPASS has been synchronized with the Object-Matching with the addition of lock waiting in all production tasks that are not MROW (Many Readers One Writer) and require write access/updates to the database.

 

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         The TYCHO-2 Catalog was received and installed into the pipeline operations catalog area. This will become the default astrometric catalog as soon as testing of the delivery is complete.

·         Made a few bug fixes to the task Apply_Calib. A switch was put in Apply_Calib so that if no astrometric mask exists then it will not apply one, instead of aborting.

·         The star count package now accesses the database, calculating the observed star counts and also determining the theoretical star counts by the Mendez, van Altena method.

·         More revisions were made to the GSC 1.2 paper. In addition a few statistical programs were written to provide figures and tables to show the improvement with GSC 1.2.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         Conducted a literature search on classification features, techniques, and results being produced by other sky survey groups.

·         Prepared documentation and conducted training sessions in hand classifying objects for training sets.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)

·         OATo staff re-reduced one full night from ESO run#3, for which a large part of the data was originally missing. This allowed recovery of fields S002, S146, and S185 that did not have any other observations.

·         Processing nights 3,4, and 6 from ESO run #5. There was a problem related to the fact that the fits files contained neither the telescope coordinates nor the sidereal time of the observation. OATo staff successfully recreated the fits headers, and now can run the pipeline reduction software.

·         Acquired one night of GSPC-II observations at the JKT telescope of La Palma (February 13, observer Maureen van den Berg). The raw data is in house.

·         Processing images from the last KPNO run corresponding to the equatorial field X850, observed to resolve the vignetting correction.  Two bands (V,R) were successfully observed and 21 square degrees have been already calibrated; with V magnitude from ~10 to ~20 mag.  Due to the large format images, reduction of these data would have been impossible without the upgraded processor and software.

·         The analysis of the 137 equatorial fields selected for public release is proceeding.  A complete assessment should be finished soon, together with a series of clean sequences to be exported.

 

GSC-II General Software Development

·         With OATo staff, identified a minor bug in the object detection and deblending software. The bugfix will be included in the next software delivery.

 

GSC-II Science

·         Arranging visit of Daniela Carollo from OATo during the month of April to begin work on a systematic search for halo White Dwarf candidates. We plan on using this to prototype similar techniques for mining the GSC-II database.

 


 

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

 

SCANNING                                                                                                                                  

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

%

done

Notes

Priority

POSS-II J

897

898

0

898

   100 

 

-

POSS-II F

897

907

0

907

100

         S4

-

POSS-II N

897

787

0

787

88

 

1

AAO-SES

606

602

4

606

100

         S4

-

PPARC-ER

288

252

18

270

94

 

1

AAO-SR

118

118

0

118

100

S2

-

UKST-IR

894

285

59

344

39

 

2

SERC-J/EJ

447

443

0

443

99

      S1

           2

POSS-I E

106

106

0

106

     100

        S3

-

POSS-I O

880

30

23

53

6

 

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

56

36

92

10

 

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

 

-

POSS-II F

897

878

0

878

98

 

1

POSS-II N

897

66

60

126

14

 

3

AAO-SES

606

576

0

576

95

 

1

PPARC-ER

288

239

11

250

87

 

1

AAO-SR

109

0

0

73

67

 

2

UKST-IR

894

0

0

1

0

 

3

SERC-J/EJ

894

892

0

892

100

 

-

SERC-J/REPAIR

48

48

0

48

100

 

-

POSS-I E

933

928

0

928

99

 

2

POSS-I REPAIR

198

198

0

198

100

 

-

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

66

0

66

2

 

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

 

-

POSS-II N

897

41

0

41

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

 

-

 

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 969,703,754)

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-I E

880

0

5

5

0

 

3

POSS-QV

613

0

0

0

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

441

69

510

49

 

1

POSS-II F

897

728

15

743

81

 

1

POSS-II N

897

0

3

3

0

 

4

SERC-J

894

123

5

128

14

 

1

South-F

894

461

12

473

51

 

1

UKST-IR

894

0

0

0

0

 

4

South-SR

109

13

0

     13

    12

 

2

South-QV

94

13

44

57

14

 

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

578

0

578

99

 

1

POSS-II

295

144

0

144

49

 

1

SERC

894

873

0

873

98

 

1

 

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-I

584

578

0

578

99

P1

1

POSS-II

295

144

0

144

49

 

1

SERC

894

873

0

873

98

 

1