CASB Report for
June, 2000
·
Released the
"automated" version of the Bright Object checker to the STIS
group.
·
McLean, as a member
of the SOC, participated in the June NVO workshop and presented a review of
current ground-based wide-area surveys.
·
Laidler
attended the AAS meeting in Rochester, NY.
·
Conducted
tours for attendees of the Space Astrophysics Detector Conference.
·
Volpicelli
(OATo) visited STScI and delivered a new version of the CIQA software.
·
Reviewed four
Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs). Of
these, three were due to fine-lock failures caused by close doubles and one was
a search failure. The search failure
was a blended object in the outer region of a globular cluster. Bad GS Alerts
were filed for all four GSPRs.
·
Investigated a
GSC-I problem for an HST target, HD 48279, which is a triple system. The GSC-I entries, derived from INCA data,
have serious errors that might affect alerts for bright objects or
spoilers. Recommended that PSD correct
the operations version of GSC-I.
·
Released the "automated" version of
the Bright Object checker to the STIS group.
Claus Leitherer, Instrument Scientist for STIS, has requested that his
colleagues in STIS begin using the program and report any problems. Feedback has been positive.
·
Working with
Ron Downes, STIS Instrument Scientist, and Tony Krueger, head of APT/VTT
development, to further develop and finalize the requirements for integrating
the Bright Object checking into the Visual Target Tuner (VTT). Meeting this week with the developers of the
Astronomer's Proposal Tool (APT) and the VTT to establish a timeline for
integrating the Bright Object checker into the VTT by the end of the year.
·
Spagna is
finalizing report on Guide Star availability for submission to NGST division.
·
McLean and Morrison
attended meeting on requirements for target selection for NEXUS and NGST
optical alignment.
·
Morrison was
assigned to participate in NGST operations concept and proposal teams.
·
Completed
scanning the ROE plate shipment of the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way.
·
Returned this
shipment to ROE and requested that ROE resume sending us only UKST-IR plates
until we complete all those that are available.
·
Resumed
scanning the POSSI-O plates.
·
Shipment of
POSS-II plates arrived from USNO, Flagstaff, at the end of the period.
·
Both GAMMA
systems are running well.
·
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 continues.
·
Reorganizing
the storage cabinets for the 8-mm tape archive.
·
Received a
return shipment of 8-mm scan tapes from ECF.
·
No progress reported
in investigation of a GETIMAGE failure with the DSS-I, first reported by the
NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.
·
Continued
processing of the POSSI-E (red) survey for GSC2. Processing efficiency for the past month has been very high. Altered the detection threshold slightly for
these plates to inhibit detections of false objects caused by higher grain
noise in the older emulsions. Tests have shown very little impact on faint object
detections when using the slightly higher detection thresholds.
·
Tests are
continuing on the astrometry problems seen on a small number of these
plates. It is estimated that the
POSSI-E survey will be completely processed within the next month to six weeks
at current rates.
·
Object
Matching has been running and is almost complete for plates previously loaded
in the database. Hardware failures have significantly slowed operations.
·
Replaced a
failed drive in the RAID array.
· Essentially a small circle is drawn around every measured object. For all reference stars within the circle, differences between the reference stars' standard coordinates and those obtained from GSC-II pipeline calibration are determined. A weighted average, based on distance to the central star, of delta xi and delta eta is found for all these differences. The central star's standard coordinates are then corrected by this average value.
· Results from initial testing using this method look "good" with remaining residuals of the order of 0.1 to 0.15 arc-sec. Because this method is somewhat time-consuming a short cut method, called a filter-mask, has also been developed.
· In the filter-mask method a closely spaced grid of points (hopefully smaller than the scale of the systematics we are trying to remove) is created. These grid points are then treated as artificial measured objects, a circle is drawn around each object, and the delta xi and delta eta determined as before. This filter-mask is applied just like an astrometric mask. Initial testing using the filter-mask and longer filter method shows little difference.
· In addition, testing using the distortion equations to remove the global systematics common to a set of plates in combination with the filter method does as good or better at removing the systematics than the mask/filter combination.
· More testing on how to chose the reference stars, the weighting method and size of the circle is needed.
·
Reviewing of the
non-astronomical literature on classification and decision trees in progress.
CALIBRATIONS: Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)
·
(OATo)
Submitted a proposal to the Dutch time allocation panel in collaboration with
R. Le Poole to the use 90cm Dutch telescope at La Silla for 20 nights with the
goal of completing the southern GSPC-II sequences, and re-observing some
high-galactic-latitude fields.
·
(OATo)
Extracted all the ESO reduced data (excluding the CCD images) from the single
CD-Roms and put them together in a unique CD-Rom for easy access.
·
(OATo)
Continuing global statistics and QA of the 850 GSPC-II fields selected for
publication.
·
Archived all
GSPC-II data in two DLT copy sets to be stored at OATo and STScI.
·
The routine
procedure to fix GSPC-II data reported from the GSC-II processing pipeline is
running.
·
Provided
Gemini Telescope Operations with a procedure for extrapolating GSC-II
magnitudes to 2Mass magnitudes.
·
Running
several tests to use 2Mass data when GSPC-II is not available. A quick extraction
procedure was created to read this catalog from the net.
·
·
A report
describing the two-plate quality assurance software developed at OATo is
available via web. http://astroserver.to.astro.it/papers/IntRep/00_53_qa_reports.doc.
·
In particular,
implemented a new routine concerning the star counts of matched objects. The
QA_2plates procedure has been checked on a sample of about 40 pairs of matched
plates loaded in the local COMPASS database.
·
Created a new
routine that collects all the most important data to have a comparison of the
results produced by QA_2plates on the
whole sample of processed plates.
·
Three datasets were consigned to the CRA researchers: two consisting of
plate based reductions at the NGP and one an all sky extraction from the export
catalogue.
·
Received two new data requests for research proposals from Mignani-ESO
and Fresneau-Strasbourg; these will be discussed presently.
·
The search for high proper motion objects in the regions 443 and 444
towards the North Galactic Pole has provided eight candidates of which two have
been followed up spectroscopically. A
new field (137), which is suitable for summer follow-up, has been selected and
processing started.
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-SR
|
112 |
0 |
50 |
50 |
45 |
S5 |
3 |
|
UKST-IR |
894 |
449 |
13 |
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 |
880 |
141 |
0 |
141 |
16 |
|
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 |
211 |
16 |
227 |
25 |
|
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 |
205 |
20 |
225 |
25 |
|
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 |
0 |
60 |
60 |
7 |
|
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 |
880 |
362 |
316 |
678 |
77 |
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 |