CASB Report for March, 2000

 

Highlights for Division Meeting.

·         Object matching and application of photometric recalibrations for plates in the COMPASS database are progressing smoothly.  The results will be included in the next GSC-II release.

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         McLean visited the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Group for update on plate scanning and archive activities.

·         Morrison attended IAU Symposium 180: “Towards Models and Constants for Sub-Microarcsecond Astrometry” in Washington.

·         Guglielmetti went to the Washington Area Astronomers meeting in College Park.

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         McLean visited OATo for a project status review.

·         Wil O'Mullane visited to continue development of JAVA user interface to the GSC-2 export catalogue and COMPASS.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         No new GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) were received this period.

·         Continuing to work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, which will be available for STIS, ACS and COS, in cycle 10.  Currently developing a way to make Bright Object checking more automated for the Contact Scientist. 

·         Working with Jerry Kriss and Claus Leitherer of the STIS team to implement a tool that overlays a DSS display with the GSC-II and provides a table of magnitudes, colors, and coordinates.  Planning an initial delivery of the tool for STIS team use in a few weeks.

·         Also collaborating with Tony Krueger in ESS to develop the Visual Target Tuner, a component of the astronomer’s proposal tool.  Investigating how PIs might use it for Bright Object checking.

 

NGST Guiding Studies

·         Alessandro Spagna will visit for the month of April to work on the NGST Guide Star report.

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         Completed scanning the 8th shipment of UKST-IR plates; preparing a return shipment to ROE.

·         Scanning slowed due to GAMMA2 problems.

·         Received a printed list of accepted POSS-II plates from CalTech.  Reviewed list, notified CalTech of a few discrepancies, and requested delivery of missing plates.

 

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         Problems persist on GAMMA2.  After nearly two months of nominal operations, problems showed up on three recent scans.  These scans, which were rejected and re-scanned on GAMMA1, showed anomalous interline shearing at about the 0.1 pixel level.  Mechanical adjustments along with a large number of test and engineering scans have failed to reveal the nature of this problem.  Engineering scans specifically designed to measure interline and inter pass correlation's showed good performance yet the problems persisted in test production scans.  More tests and mechanical adjustments are planned.

 

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 plates continues.

 

Archive Maintenance

·         Made available to CalTech all the reprocessed GSH header files for the POSS-II survey.

·Performed a little reorganizing of the tape archive for better organization and more available space.

 

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

·         Began processing of POSS-I E red plates in the GSC2 production pipeline.  Major processing script changes were necessary for both algorithmic reasons and to improve data management and flow.  It is believed this survey could be processed very rapidly into catalog files for COMPASS ingest.

 

COMPASS Database

·         Production object-matching has completed 1269 plates.  This task will continue to run over the next few weeks.

·         ApplyCalibs database production task has been running on all the plates in COMPASS to update the photometric calibrations.  The task was halted briefly to improve performance of the (more important and computationally intensive) plate matching routine.  To date 664 plates have had the latest calibrations applied to the COMPASS database.  The apply calibrations task has performed well with only one problem plate of the 664.  The recalibrated data will be included in the next GSC-II release.

·         A JAVA application, ShowSky, was developed with interfaces to multiple catalog and image archives.  A query interface to COMPASS was written and successfully deployed.  This visualization tool allows users to overplot the GSC-2 export catalog with the COMPASS catalog data with DSS images.  An installation kit was completed.  Final delivery to general users will require a Web license for Objectivity, which has been budgeted.  Cost negotiation for this license is in progress.

·         Objectivity was upgraded to version 5.2.1 to resolve kernel memory leaks.  The transaction cleanup delay problem still persists.

·         COMPASS administrative tasks for reclaiming empty page files was run on the entire Federated database (All-Sky).  This maintenance task reclaimed ~ 50GB of fragmented space.

·         A new Dell 6350 server was received and the configuration of this system has been initiated.  COMPASS will be migrated to this system in the weeks ahead.  We are waiting for the arrival of the remaining disk racks and resolution of hardware related issues to complete the assembly.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         Installed the Tycho 2 catalog into the VMS database. Will begin using this improved catalog for pipeline calibrations.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         Performed more classification experiments, fine tuned the training set marking tool, and made a "tinker” version of Classify that tells which final leaf node an object ends up in.

 

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

·         Beatrice Bucciarelli will visit for a week in April to work on GSPC-II testing and publication.

·         Reduced the remaining data to complete the 49 sq deg area observed with the KPNO CCD MOSAIC. Photographic error analysis is in progress using plates XJ850 and XP850.

·         Correcting astrometric errors in GSPC-II sequences that cause problems in the GSC-II pipeline.

 

GSC-II General Software Development

·         Defined and tested a build of pipeline software including Features, ApplyCalib, Photosol, Inventory, and Deblender tasks.  Also tested related infrastructure software (the Catalog Stager and XSPAM).

·         Ported the RCAT task to the CASB environment; modified the XSPAM catalog stager to work with the new TYCHO 2 catalog.

·         Reviewed ongoing development work  on QA tasks.

 

GSC-II Science

·         Daniela Carollo will visit for 3 weeks in April to work on identifying high proper motion halo white dwarf stars.

·         George Hawkins is visiting to continue his research on open clusters.

·         Prepared and sent two DLTs to OATo containing 40 scans of XO plates.

·         Also sent an MOD containing the most recent GSH and DID files.

·         Using a better, faster tool for matching members of open clusters.

·         Still studying proper motions of members of the NGC2264 cluster.

 


 

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

344

40

384

43

 

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

53

33

86

10

 

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

92

48

140

16

 

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

126

40

166

19

 

           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/15m

451

266

95

362

80

 

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

66

39

105

12

 

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 = 969,703,754)

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-I E

880

5

0

5

0

 

3

POSS-QV

613

0

0

0

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

510

0

510

49

 

1

POSS-II F

897

743

0

743

81

 

1

POSS-II N

897

3

0

3

0

 

4

SERC-J

894

128

0

128

14

 

1

South-F

894

473

0

473

51

 

1

UKST-IR

894

0

0

0

0

 

4

South-SR

109

13

0

     13

    12

 

2

South-QV

94

57

0

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