CASB Report April, 2001

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         Completed the export of over 99.5% of database regions into the GSC2.2 catalog.

·         Delivered the Instrument Scientist’s version of the Bright Object Tool.

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         Loomis participated in a live web cast as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium multimedia "Origins" exhibit featuring the Hubble Space Telescope.  A tape was shown of the plate vault and scanning machines. He was interviewed and provided narration for the plate vault segment as well as answering questions.

·         Morrison attended Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the AAS meeting in Houston (April 23- 25) and presented a talk on the GSC-II catalog.

·         McLean is away on a GSPC-II observing run at La Palma.

·         Supported tours for Bring Your Children Day.

·         Mario Lattanzi visited CASB, April 17–27, to start on a GSC-II document (including a description and evaluation of GSC 2.2) suitable for both the new web pages and as an advanced draft of a paper for eventual submission to a major journal (probably AJ). A detailed outline was put together, which has already evolved into a draft article. After McLean reviews this draft, it will be circulated internally. Thanks to Laidler, Morrison, McLean and Smart for providing Lattanzi with much of the text needed for the editing task.

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

·         Wil O'Mullane is visiting CASB and working on ShowSky, which will be used for GSC-II/DSS-II access.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Reviewed four Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) and one HOPR this period.  Three GSPRs were fine lock failures; another was a search failure due to a misclassified plate flaw. The HOPR documented acquisition problems due to the relatively high proper motion of the GS.  Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

·         Continued work with Jesse Doggett on the Bright Object portion of the Astronomer's Proposal Tool and the Visual Target Tuner.  At the end of March, delivered an initial version of the Bright Object Tool to the Instrument Scientists, to enable them to check Phase II proposals for health and safety issues.   (Previously released a public version of the tool for STIS MAMA imaging.)

·         The next goal is to have another public release of Bright Object Tool around the beginning of June, which will include the use of the new GSC 2.2 plus minor bug fixes that are found.

·         Provided support for production of STIS moving-target finder charts and data for Venus and Mars observations.

 

NGST Development Studies

·          

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         Scanned POSS-I O plates until the latest shipment of UKST-IR plates was logged in.

·         Scanned only a few UKST-IR plates before both microdensitometers were taken out of production.

 

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         No maintenance performed this period due to allocation of resources to complete GSC2.2.

·         GAMMA1 needs preventive maintenance.

·         GAMMA2 remains out of production due to a problem that is causing a feedback to the X-servo causing very unstable table motion.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         Continued compressing scans of the POSSII-N survey.

·         Completed compressing all the UKST-IR plates that have been scanned so far.

·         Modified compression pipeline to allow compression of POSSI-O and AAO-SR (short-red) plate scans.   Started compressing the latter.

 

Archive Maintenance

·         Completed the archive of all AAO-SR plates to MOD.

·         Continued low-level rationalization of MOD archive.

 

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

·         Completed the export of 32,633 database regions, over 99.5% of the total, into the GSC2.2 export catalog. Most of the remaining 135 regions were excluded due to plate matching problems. This export catalog is composed of two bandpasses with all sky coverage.

·         Reduced the number of unmatched southern plates to six.  Several of these are very complicated areas of the sky for which no short exposure plate exists.

·         Identified and corrected a number of problem plates through analysis of statistics associated with the export.  Corrected over 300 regions so far and now actively cleaning up all known errors.  The cleanup time frame is estimated to be on the order of a few weeks and should result in the addition of many additional catalog entries.

·         The current counts of objects in the GSC-II database are 423,597,861 in the north and 564,804,940 in the south, for a total of 998,402,801.  Currently 396,423,219 of these objects are in the export catalog, which has faint magnitude restrictions.

·         Resumed processing POSSII-N plates.

·         Also processed 15 plates of the UKST-IR survey, which lacks an astrometric mask.  Constructing a mask from the plates just processed.  When the mask is available, will recalibrate these plates and then continue processing the rest of the UKST-IR plates.

 

CALIBRATIONS: General

·         Performed statistical analyses and spot-checking of the exported catalog regions to identify problem areas and to verify expected performance.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         Worked on quantifying the magnitude term in GSC II positions by comparing the GSC 2.1 catalog with the 2MASS, SPM and NPM catalogs.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         Completed a set of cross-validation experiments to determine the optimum size of the feature set for classification. Experiments were conducted on both a subset of the best features, selected via correlation analysis and analysis of the current decision trees, and on the full set of features.

·         Results indicate that the OC1 decision tree is quite robust even with the full set of 30 features, as there is no indication of confusion reducing the accuracy at higher feature set sizes. The size of the feature set can probably be reduced by 10-15 features without impacting accuracy, which would improve run-time performance. These experiments also provide an additional independent assessment of which are the most significant features.

·         Began analysis of the multi-plate voting used for classification in the GSC2.2 export catalog. Preliminary comparisons to a subset of the 2MASS PSC indicate that unanimity in voting is a good indication of classification quality. Comparisons to a color-selected galaxy subset of the FIRST catalog indicate very good results: 91% completeness for a sample of 7249 galaxies in a magnitude range of 10 < F < 17.5.

 

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

·         Reduced observations from the latest CTIO observing run.

·         Observing run using JKT at La Palma is in progress (Apr 26 – May 02)

 

GSC-II Science 

·         F. Guglielmetti is working on production of a new Planetary Nebula catalog with improved coordinates from GSC2.1. She is collaborating with Florian Kerber, Roberto Mignani, and Andreas Wicenec (ESO).  The new catalog is nearly complete except for some areas that are expected to be covered by GSC2.2.

·         D. Carollo has identified a carbon dwarf star among the halo white dwarf candidates. This is a significant discovery!

 


 

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

 

SCANNING                                                                                                                                                                         

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

%

done

Notes

Priority

POSS-II J

897

902

0

902

   100 

         S4

1

POSS-II F

897

910

0

910

100

         S4

1

POSS-II N

897

880

0

880

98

         S4

1

AAO-SES

606

614

0

614

100

         S4

1

PPARC-ER

288

288

0

288

100

 

1

AAO-SR

118

118

0

118

100

S2

-

UKST-SR

112

50

0

50

45

S5

3

UKST-IR

894

652

6

658

74

 

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

301

6

307

33

 

3

Rescans

 

34

0

34

 

 

 

 

COMPRESSION

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-II J

897

895

0

897

100

 

           2

POSS-II F

897

897

0

897

100

 

1

POSS-II N

897

541

36

577

64

 

3

AAO SES

606

606

0

606

100

 

1

PPARC ER

288

288

0

288

100

 

1

UKST-IR

894

570

88

658

74

 

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

900

0

900

100

 

3

POSS-II N

897

780

43

823

92

 

           4

AAO-SES

606

613

0

613

100

 

3

PPARC-ER

288

288

0

288

100

 

3

AAO-SR

109

73

43

116

100

 

4

UKST-IR

894

653

5

658

74

 

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

931

0

931

99

 

3

POSS-QV

613

2

0

2

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

897

0

897

100

 

1

POSS-II F

897

897

0

897

100

 

1

POSS-II N

897

44

38

82

9

 

4

SERC-J/EJ 

     894

829

0

829

93

 

1

South-F

894

894

0

894

100

 

1

UKST-IR

894

0

15

15

2

 

4

South-SR

116

110

6

116

100

 

2

South-QV

94

94

0

94

100

 

2

 

 

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (no.objects = 998,402,801)

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-I E

936

23

0

23

2

 

3

POSS-QV

613

2

0

2

0

 

3

POSS-II J

897

897

0

897

100

 

1

POSS-II F

897

899

0

899

100

 

1

POSS-II N

897

27

0

27

3

 

4

SERC-J

894

708

1

709

79

 

1

South-F

894

742

0

742

83

 

1

UKST-IR

894

2

0

2

0

 

4

South-SR

116

116

0

116

100

 

2

South-QV

94

90

0

90

96

 

2

 


 

 

 

 

GSC-II Dataset for V2.2.n delivery (1791 Fields, 3438 plates)   (P1)

Item

Count

% done

Notes

Plates available

3438

100

 

Plates processed

3438

100

 

DB Load

3438

100

 

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

2

561

96

P1

1

POSS-II

314

169

2

171

54

 

1

SERC

894

868

16

884

99

 

1

 

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey

Goal

Previous Month

Current Month

Current Total

% done

Notes

Priority

POSS-I

584

561

2

563

96

P1

1

POSS-II

314

171

4

175

56

 

1

SERC

894

884

17

901

100

 

1