CASB Report March,
2001
·
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.
· 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.
·
McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning
activities.
· 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.
· Morrison is participating in the NGST proposal writing.
·
Continued
scanning POSS-I O plates.
·
Received and
unpacked a shipment of UKST-IR plates from ROE.
·
Continued
compressing scans of the POSSII-N and UKST-IR surveys.
· 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.
·
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.
· 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.
· Working on defining the magnitude dependent systematic errors in the GSC-II positions by making comparisons to the SPM, NMP and 2MASS catalogs.
· 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)
· 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).
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 |
|
|
|
|
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 |
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 |