CASB Report for May,
2000
·
Completed
scanning half of all the expected UKST-IR plates.
·
Processed over
240 POSSI-E plate scans for GSC-II this month; total now is over 40% of the
survey.
·
McLean is
member of SOC for upcoming NVO workshop (June 13-16)
·
The new
COMPASS server configuration with 2TB disk was completed.
·
Reviewed 22
Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs). Of
these, 16 were due to fine-lock failures caused by close doubles, and 6 were
search failures. Five of the search
failures were galaxies misclassified in GSC-I, but the sixth object was simply
fainter than expected. Bad GS Alerts
were filed for all 22 GSPRs. Several
more GSPRs were received at the end of the period.
·
Investigated
FGS search failures for several GSs derived from a Black Birch astrometric
plate that includes the bright star Canopus.
Processed this plate using the GSC-II pipeline processing. The results of the new astrometric and
photometric calibrations indicate that the quality of the original GSC-I
positions and magnitudes were adequate for FGS acquisition. The investigation continues.
·
Continuing to
work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, to be made available to STIS, ACS and
COS for cycle 10. Ron Downes, who is a
STIS contact scientist and also a member of the APT/VTT team, has provided
clearer requirements for not only the automated version of the Bright Object
Checker, but also for the version that hopefully will be part of the VTT. (APT
is the Astronomer's Proposal Tool and VTT is the Visual Target Tuner.) These
requirements will be used to create an implementation timeline with an ultimate
completion of January 2001.
·
Plan to have
the automated version of the Bright Object Checker ready for release by next
week.
·
Spagna is
preparing report for submission to NGST division.
·
Scanned
POSSI-O plates until the latest ROE shipment arrived and then started scanning
the UKST-IR plates in that shipment.
·
As of this
report, completed scanning half of all the expected UKST-IR plates. The current shipment contains both IR and
moderately-short exposure R plates (henceforth referred to as RS plates) from
the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way.
·
GAMMA 2 is
back in full production scanning. Scan
diagnostics show excellent performance of the mechanical and optical system.
·
GAMMA 1 is
currently down for mechanical work. The
scanning program was crashing due to S/W time-outs. It was thought that the time-outs were due to mechanical
problems. So far, mechanical problems
were found and fixed, but the time-out problem still exists. More tests are planned.
·
Affected a
workaround in software for the broken terminal server that controls the console
on one of the scanning machines. A change to a task parameter file redirected
the X, Y, and density information from the physical displays on the console to
a DECTerm window. The display, while not aesthetic, is sufficient to support
scanning. Additional software changes required replacing the original displays
in a more user friendly fashion will be undertaken as resources permit.
·
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.
·
Performing
quality assurance of the MOD archive, starting with the AAO-SR survey since
that collection has known errors.
Fixing errors when possible; some discs will be rewritten when the QA is
complete.
·
No progress
reported in investigation of a GETIMAGE failure with the DSS-I, first reported
by the NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.
·
Processing of
the POSS-I red plates continues at a very efficient pace. Over 40% of this
survey has now been processed. Several
small problems encountered regarding astrometric solutions are currently under
investigation.
·
Created a
simple IDL tool to interactively flag bad or corrupted objects from the oop
records. This tool was created in
response to a number of POSS-I red archival data containing small regions of
corrupted data that probably dates back to problems with an older media (video
grade 8mm tape).
·
Loaded the
production GSC-II COMPASS database onto the new COMPASS 2 Terabyte server. This will provide a fully online access to
all second generation processed and calibrated plates required for GSC-II
catalog construction.
·
Production
object-matching is now in progress on the new server.
·
Preparation
for the next delivery of the GSC-II catalog is underway. The near term plan is to complete
recalibration and object-matching on all the plates currently loaded in
COMPASS. The export is scheduled to
complete in the coming month.
·
Benchmark
testing with the new system confirmed a marked improvement in I/O performance
with an increase to 50MB/sec as compared to the old system with 3-5
MB/sec. The GSC-II catalog production
pipeline tasks are taking approximately one-half the time of the old system
pipeline.
·
Performed an
assessment of the various HTM 1st levels of storage in the database
to improve understanding of the different disk capacities. This was necessary because the disk
configuration maps directly to the sky partitioning of the database. Of the 8 regions on the sky, N0 was shown to
contain 2x the number of calibrated sources.
·
Rebuilt the
testFDB on the old system under the new server host, CHART. This will provide a separate staging area to
the system lock-server and make calibration development and QA tasks perform
more efficiently.
·
Successfully
loaded GSPC-II as an external reference catalog into the testFDB.
·
Grant funds
were used to purchase an Objectivity license for the CASB Web server to allow
external access to GSC-II.
·
Nearly
completed testing the equations describing the astrometric Schmidt plate distortions
caused by the bending of the plates in the telescope plate holder. Essentially,
the residuals determined from the mask process are used as data for testing.
The standard coordinates of the mask points (and their delta xi and delta eta)
are converted into polar coordinates because the distortion pattern is easier
to represent in these coordinates than in rectangular coordinates.
·
A general
least squares routine is used to solve for the coefficients of the delta theta
and delta r. The least squares routine is written to solve for one equation
(one for delta theta and one for delta r) for the entire plate, or for eight
equations independently (one for each symmetric region), or for eight equations
while enforcing overlapping objects as a restraint on the equations.
·
Various
different models have been tried. The
actual astrometric mask is compared to a mask created with the coefficients
determined from the above least squares fit. A refinement of the selection of
overlapping objects is currently underway. At this stage it does not appear
that the equations will be able to completely replace the astrometric mask, but
possibly using the equations before the mask is created can improve the
accuracy of the mask. At least this method should help to find abnormal plates
that do not fit the astrometric mask.
·
Experimentally
modified the decision tree program to use weights during the pruning process.
This permits a more sophisticated assessment of tree performance in terms of
contamination and completeness of various classes, rather than a simple overall
right/wrong error rate. The implementation of the weighting needs improvement,
but preliminary results are very encouraging. On an intermediate latitude test
plate, 4.5% of the objects changed classification. Nearly all of these objects
down to 15th magnitude were visually inspected: the results were
better for 68% of them, and worse for only 17%. One notable improvement was
“recapturing” many galaxies that had been previously classified as defects.
Most of the objects with worse results were objects that had been through the
deblender. Experiments to improve the
results on these objects by including more deblended objects in the training
set are underway.
·
The classify
task was modified in develop to produce “leaf” information for each object
classified, and IDL routines were written to read and display the leaf
information. This provides surprising insights into the behavior of various
populations of objects through the decision trees – for example, some leaves
contain objects of all magnitudes, some contain objects of only a very small
magnitude range, and some seem to contain bimodal populations, that is, bright
objects, faint objects, but no intermediate objects.
CALIBRATIONS: Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)
·
Photometric
masks for POSS-II J and F and for southern J and F surveys are available for
testing. Preliminary results show that the RMS in magnitude dispersion has an
improvement of 60% for the J bandpass and 70% for the F bandpass on the basis
of a single equatorial plate pair for each color.
·
The GSPC2 data
archiving to DLT is still in progress.
·
Prepared an
export fits GSPC-II catalog, which is ready to be released to the community. It
contains unique names (for multiple observations), and averaged values of ra,
dec, v, verr,
r, and rerr,
plus b and berr
when b photometry is available.
·
·
A small bug
was found and corrected in the PLATE_SOLUTION task.
·
Defined a new
bandpass code for the 098-04 + RG630 emulsion/filter combination used for RS
survey plates recently received.
·
A PUTOOP
routine was developed for the XSPAM library.
·
Fabrizia Guglielmetti is processing 11 plates to
correlate and find the proper motion of the cluster NGC2264. This study is more difficult than
expected. She started working on
five plates containing the cluster: three from the POSS-II survey and two from
POSS-I. The POSS-I plates contain part of the cluster only in their southeast
corners; so plate-matching results are very poor. Moreover, processing of one POSS-II plate produced wrong
classifications. During the coming
month Guglielmetti hopes to find a consistent solution for the cluster
members.
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 |
412 |
37 |
449 |
50 |
|
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 |
115 |
26 |
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 |
179 |
32 |
211 |
24 |
|
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 |
194 |
11 |
205 |
23 |
|
4 |
AAO-SES |
606 |
576 |
11 |
587 |
97 |
|
3 |
PPARC-ER |
288 |
250 |
0 |
250 |
87 |
|
3 |
AAO-SR |
109 |
73 |
0 |
73 |
67 |
|
4 |
UKST-IR |
894 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
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 |
121 |
241 |
362 |
41 |
|
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 |
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 |