CASB Report for July, 2000

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         Received, scanned, compressed and archived the plate for the final POSS-II J field. 

·         Successfully completed production Object Matching on 1900 loaded plates in COMPASS.

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         B. McLean attended the “Mining the Sky” conference at ESO, Garching, 31 July 31 – 4 Aug.

·         V. Laidler visited OATo 10-14 July to work primarily with R. Smart on the classification project.

·         B. Bucciarelli is visiting from OATo and is working on the GSPC-II publication.

·         Conducted tours of CASB for the HST flight software team.

·         A review of the CASB WWW pages has been initiated.  There is a plan in place to update the current WWW contents, repair broken links, and upgrade the current sites to reflect the current status of the GSC-2 project.

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         The 6th annual GSC-II meeting has been scheduled for Oct 19-20 2000.

·         Completed annual performance evaluations.

 

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Received nine Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) near the end of the period, but have not yet reviewed them.

·         Continuing work on the Bright Object tool for the Visual Target Tuner (VTT).  Jesse Doggett, one of the developers of the VTT, has consulted and helped put together some very rough estimates of what will be involved in completing the project and how long it might take.  Plan on having a meeting with McLean, Asbury, and the developers to discuss this soon.

·         Provided a J-F to V-R color transformation for northern and southern surveys for STIS BOP. This equation is valid just for a well-known and restricted stellar population.

·         J. Morrison is now part of the NGST Operations Concept Committee and has been helping with the Concept document and reading background material on the NGST project.

·         Morrison and Sturch participated in an NGST Guidestars splinter meeting.

·         A research project is now underway for obtaining a list of target and guide stars to be used for testing the alignment of the NGST guiding camera. This initial list is being made using the TYCHO 2 catalog. At a later date we will use the GSC-II for this test (if needed).

·         Color transformation from B-V (Tycho) to V-K was provided to estimate the K magnitude of Tycho stars for NGST support.

·         There were difficulties this month with regard to DSS access due to a combination of two separate failures. The CASB CDROM jukeboxes “unlimited” licenses expired and the software vendor has recently gone out of business and we are unable to get this corrected. At the same time, the AB jukeboxes were experiencing hardware failures resulting in only limited service for a period of 2-3 weeks. A plan to migrate the data from CDROM to hard disk in being prepared and will be implemented as soon as possible.

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         Scanned POSSI-O plates until the shipment of POSS-II plates via USNO was available.

·         Scanning this new shipment, which contains POSSII-N plates plus five better plates of POSSII J and R fields including one for the lone J field for which we had no plate.  We still need to acquire the accepted plate for field 377 of the POSSII-J survey.

·         Received a shipment of UKST-IR plates at the end of the period.

 

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         Plate scanning operations for GAMMA1 have been nominal for the previous month with no downtime recorded. Plate scanning on GAMMA2 was interrupted briefly due to a mechanical hardware failure.  The part was identified and repaired quickly; production scanning was resumed within one day with nominal results.

·         At the end of the period, condensation from the building cooling system leaked into the GAMMA2 room.  Some electronics were damaged and some bearings on GAMMA2 were corroded.  Damage is being corrected.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         Compressed the final POSS-II J plate, which was received and scanned this month. Archived the last set of four J plates.  Meanwhile, compression of POSS-II N continued.

·         Found that the software that updates and appends to the XDSS index file during the process of building new headers for the CDROM set is not fully Y2K compliant! Plates taken after 31 Dec 1999 are recorded in this index file as epoch 1900. The headers themselves are prepared correctly however, and record the epoch as 2000.

·         Teaching colleague to compress the UKST-IR Survey scans.

 

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 

·         Continued making excellent progress on processing the POSSI red plates.  Started to perform cleanup processing of any unprocessed plates as well as those that suffered problems in processing.  It is expected that all POSSI red plates will be completed prior to the next monthly report.

·         Performed QA on calibrations of the plates scheduled for the next export catalog of GSC-II.  Identified a relatively small sample needing new calibrations.  These were completed and applied to the data.  Problem plates were also checked and failures in the apply calibrations task running on NT were traced to an unusual failure mode with the VMS pipeline processing.  The ten affected plates were reprocessed and the calibrations applied.

 

COMPASS Database

·         Successfully completed production Object Matching on 1900 loaded plates in COMPASS.

·         Ran ApplyCalibs production task on COMPASS plates for improved photometric calibrations.

·         The GSC 2.1.0 export catalog production is currently underway and is almost complete.  The delivery to ESO, GEMINI, and OATo will proceed over the next two weeks, consisting of a large majority of the sky covered, in one or two bandpasses.

·         Upgraded the CIQA software on CHART and did several test runs.

·         The RAID system reached full capacity on one set with the completion of ApplyCalibs for the 'N0' sky area. COMPASS administration task for compacting database files restored several Gigabytes, but we are nearing the current disk limits.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         Did more analysis on better determining the form of the distortion equations. As part of this work, wrote a non-linear least squares routine to better determine the distortion equation coefficients. A study using Fourier transforms is now underway.

·         Modified the filter routine to make it more robust and allow more user qualifiers.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         At OATo Laidler worked primarily with Smart on the classification project.  Several useful discussions with Smart, Spagna, and Lattanzi provided further insight into issues regarding classification probabilities, sensitivities of the ranking process, multi-plate classification, and which lines of investigation to pursue next.

·         Tested a new decision tree against a trustworthy galaxy catalog and found it to perform more poorly than the current decision tree. A "faint only" decision tree was built and found to perform more poorly than random perturbations of the current production decision tree on faint objects.

 

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

 

CALIBRATIONS: Apply_Calibs:

 

GSC-II General Software Development

 

GSC-II Science   

·         Prepared and sent four MODs requiried for research to OATo.

·         Daniela Carollo’s search for high proper motion objects in two regions suitable for summer observations (137 and 100) has provided 15 candidates.  The spectral follow-up for these objects will be made probably during this week to the Apache Point Observatory.


 

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

 

SCANNING                                                                                                                                                                         

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

%

done

Notes

Priority

POSS-II J

897

898

3

901

   100 

         S4

1

POSS-II F

897

907

3

910

100

         S4

1

POSS-II N

897

787

51

838

93

 

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-SR

112

50

0

50

45

S5

3

UKST-IR

894

462

0

462

52

 

2

SERC-J/EJ

447

443

0

443

99

      S1

           2

POSS-I E

106

106

0

106

     100

         S3

           3

POSS-I O

936

141

34

175

19

 

3

Rescans

 

18

5

23

 

 

 

 

COMPRESSION

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-II J

897

893

4

897

100

 

           2

POSS-II F

897

897

0

897

100

C1

1

POSS-II N

897

227

24

251

28

 

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

225

53

278

31

 

           4

AAO-SES

606

587

0

587

97

 

3

PPARC-ER

288

250

0

250

87

 

3

AAO-SR

109

73

0

73

67

 

4

UKST-IR

894

60

89

149

17

 

5

SERC-J/EJ

894

892

0

892

100

 

 

SERC-J/REPAIR

48

48

0

48

100

 

 

SERC-J/15mu

449

449

0

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

936

678

202

880

94

     G1

3

POSS-QV

613

2

0

2

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

887

0

887

99

 

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

 

·         G1.  POSS-I E totals include 66 plates processed before 2000 which will be reprocessed.

 

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

2

0

2

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

511

0

511

57

 

1

POSS-II F

897

743

0

743

83

 

1

POSS-II N

897

4

0

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.n 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

 

Fields, minus the 72 southern equatorial fields, with 1644 plates.

 

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