CASB Report March, 2001

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         Completed loading all plates needed for GSC2.2 into the COMPASS Database.

·         Completed matching objects in all northern regions and nearly all southern regions for GSC2.2.

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

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         Supported OPO in collaboration with the San Francisco Exploratorium in a project for a live web cast from STScI. Facilitated extensive filming in the plate vault of our archival plate collection as well as providing digital images and still footage for the web cast project.

·         McLean attended SDSS consortium meeting at Fermilab.

·         Morrison gave talks on GSC-II and possible science projects with this catalog at the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh and York College in New York.

·         Morrison has begun writing a journal article describing the astrometry for the GSC-II.

·         Laidler presented a poster paper on imprinting titled “Canaries in the Data Mine?” at the 2001 STScI Software workshop, 13 March 2001.

·         Supported two tours.

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Reviewed six Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period.  Two GSPRs were fine lock failures and one of these was a misclassified compact group of three stars.  The rest of the GSPRs were either coarse track or search failures. Two of these were misclassifications of an elliptical galaxy and a plate flaw.  The remaining problems were due to the GSs having much fainter magnitudes than predicted.  This pair came from GSC1 plate 0024 of field S028, which had a short GSPC-I sequence, perhaps resulting in a poor photometric calibration.  Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the six GSs.

·         Supported investigation of a missed STIS acquisition of an offset star in the Orion region.

·         Generated GSC2.2 data for STIS MAMA snapshot targets

·         Delivered the Instrument Scientist's version of the Bright Object Tool, which currently supports STIS and WFPC2.  Planning to support ACS and NICMOS and will be giving the Instrument Scientists of those teams, the tool for testing, within the next month.  The next major release of the tool is slated for June 1st.  In this release we plan on fixing some of the minor problems (or annoyances) that have been found with the tool.

 

NGST Development Studies

·         Morrison is participating in the NGST proposal writing.

 

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

·         Continued scanning POSS-I O plates.

·         Received and unpacked a shipment of UKST-IR plates from ROE.

 

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         GAMMA1 continues to perform nominally, but is in need of preventive maintenance.

·         GAMMA2 performed well all last month but was taken out of production scanning 28-Mar-2001 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 and UKST-IR surveys.

 

Archive Maintenance

·         Working on GETIMAGE failure with DSS-I first reported by NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.

·         Rewrote a number of CD’s with data errors reported by NAOJ.

 

 

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

·         Completed database plate loading of the southern plates necessary for GSC2.2, thus completing the all-sky loading.

·         Fewer than ten southern plates remain unmatched. Some of these represent problems in matching similar to the database problems reported in February for the northern hemisphere plates.

·         By reading the GSH files and DID files, have compiled a list of plates in COMPASS database that do not have adequate calibrations for GSC-II.

·         Performed recalibration tasks on 168 plates during the month. Of these plates:

- 151 required database matching, including 63 that required database loading as well;

- 17 required only recalibration and running the NT apply calibrations task.

·         Continuing to perform QA of the loaded and matched plates.  This has revealed a small number of plates requiring additional recalibration. Also uncovered up to five plates that may require reloading.

·         Continuing to perform as much database cleanup as possible prior to supporting the catalog export.

·         Continued development of export code to support additional required parameters.

 

CALIBRATIONS: General

·         Completed running CIQA on all plates loaded into the test database.  Overlapping plate residuals in position and magnitude were studied for same color pairs. Outlier values for both astrometry and photometry are quite high in some cases; these however are not consistently identifiable as the “worst case” plates that we loaded into the test database. Analysis continues.

·         (OATo) Produced statistics on the GSCII data contained in the DID and GSH files, checking 4407 GSCII plates. In the next month, hope to publish the results in the OATo web site and in an OATo Internal Report.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

·         Working on defining the magnitude dependent systematic errors in the GSC-II positions by making comparisons to the SPM, NMP and 2MASS catalogs.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

·         Continued work with training set extrema on the decision tree for visualization and process improvement in classification. Experiments indicate that this imprinting technique can be used to add a level of reliability to the output of the classification task. This work also confirms our understanding that voting multiple trees does improve results, and that our present training set is deficient in bright objects.

·         Designed and implemented a FITS file format for the training set data for use with the OC1 tree building software. Developed a utility to convert existing training sets to FITS format. Modified OC1 so that the user can control the feature subset to be used by editing a table in the FITS training file.

 

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

·         Bucciarelli observed several GSPC-II sequences during five nights under marginal weather conditions. Garcia is reducing the data, completing 20 more sequences. He has 1.5 nights left to complete.

 

GSC-II Science 

·         F. Guglielmetti continued the Proper Motions Studies of Stellar-mass Black-Hole Candidates (BHC) project in collaboration with R.Mignani (ESO), A. Spagna (OATo) and F. Mirabel (CEA-CE Saclay):

- The identification of a BHC at high galactic latitudes raises intriguing questions in the scientific debate on the formation of stellar-mass BHs and on their association to SN events.These questions can be easily addressed by computing the BHs recoil velocity through proper motion measurements of their companion stars.

- We considered the BHC, XTE J1118+48. Its proper motion measurement obtained both in          the optical with the GSC and in the radio with the VLBA  (Very Long Baseline Array) has          been used to constrain the BH space velocity and its birthplace in the galactic halo.

·         Submitted a first paper to Nature (Mirabel et al. 2001).

 


 

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

0

652

73

 

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

219

82

301

32

 

3

Rescans

 

33

1

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

514

27

541

60

 

3

AAO SES

606

606

0

606

100

 

1

PPARC ER

288

288

0

288

100

 

1

UKST-IR

894

503

67

570

64

 

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

670

110

780

87

 

           4

AAO-SES

606

613

0

613

100

 

3

PPARC-ER

288

250

0

250

87

 

3

AAO-SR

109

73

0

73

67

 

4

UKST-IR

894

612

41

653

73

 

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

0

44

5

 

4

SERC-J/EJ 

     894

829

0

829

93

 

1

South-F

894

894

0

894

100

 

1

UKST-IR

894

2

0

2

0

 

4

South-SR

116

110

6

116

100

 

2

South-QV

94

94

0

94

100

 

2

 

 

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD

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

683

25

708

79

 

1

South-F

894

727

15

742

83

 

1

UKST-IR

894

2

0

2

0

 

4

South-SR

116

111

5

116

100

 

2

South-QV

94

77

13

90

96

 

2

 


 

 

 

 

GSC-II Dataset for V2.1.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

559

2

561

96

P1

1

POSS-II

314

169

2

171

54

 

1

SERC

894

868

16

884

99

 

1