CASB Report April,
2001
·
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.
· 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.
·
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.
· 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.
·
·
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.
·
No maintenance performed this period due to allocation
of resources to complete GSC2.2.
·
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.
· Completed the archive of all AAO-SR plates to MOD.
· Continued low-level rationalization of MOD archive.
·
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.
· Performed statistical analyses and spot-checking of the exported catalog regions to identify problem areas and to verify expected performance.
· Worked on quantifying the magnitude term in GSC II positions by comparing the GSC 2.1 catalog with the 2MASS, SPM and NPM catalogs.
· 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)
· 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!
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 |
|
|
|
|
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 |
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 |