CASB Report June 2002

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         none

Community Affairs and Communications

·         The beta version of the multimedia tour is currently available at ftp.to.astro.it, astrometry/smart/gsc2m.zip. Once final testing has been done it is planned to produce 5000 copies and distribute them to all major astronomical institutions, planetaria, etc.

·         Vicki Laidler gave a talk entitled "Stars, Galaxies, and the Ballot Box" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America in Madison, Wisconsin, in June.

·         GSC-II Web services were halted several times by problems due to a user submitting an outdated query.  Solved the problem by removing the outdated software.

·         Identified and fixed several broken links on the CASB web pages. 

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         Beatrice Bucciarelli and Mario Lattanzi (OATo) are visiting STScI for four weeks, writing a paper describing GSCII.

·         Volpicelli, Loomis, Greene and McLean attended a MS SQLserver 2000 training class

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Reviewed 5 new Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period.  Four of these were fine lock failures.  The GS in the other problem was much fainter than expected probably because the image of the GS on the GSC1 plate is in the extended glow of the bright star, Arcturus, leading to an erroneous estimate of the plate background. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

·         Occasionally answering questions from the APT team about the Bright Object Tool.

 

NGST Development Studies

 

                                      DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

 

Plate Scanning

·         Continued scanning the POSS-I O survey plates on GAMMA1.

·         Packed and returned the remaining UKST-IR and –SR plates to ROE in anticipation of receiving another shipment of the remaining POSSI-IR and UKST-IR plates necessary to complete the surveys.

 
GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         Completed mechanical work on GAMMA2 to begin troubleshooting the scanner.  This was done to ensure that the problem was not mechanical in nature. (The closed loop nature of the scanning hardware makes it difficult to identify differences between mechanical and electronic failures). 

·         After several days of testing various components, identified one problem. Unfortunately this is a very complicated component (designed that way to keep the machine from entering an auto mode in an undesirable way). Examining the schematics to identify possible failure points.  It is hoped that this component could be the root cause of many of the problems encountered when attempting production scans over the past several months.

·         GAMMA1 continues to perform nominal production scans.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         Continued CDROM copying as they are produced to the CASBRAIDTEC.

·         Continued compressing scans of the POSS-I O plates.

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

·         Continued to load and match both the northern and southern IR survey data.

·         Continued to perform pipeline processing for the small number of remaining IR fields. Many of the remaining fields contain unique processing problems.

·         Focused some attention on tracking methods to insure completeness of the IVN loading and matching as well as insuring all fields have the most current calibrations.

 
SOFTWARE

·         Continued the backup of CASB software currently on the Chart server to the Compass server and the re-organization of the development code. 

·         Continued development of a program that will access the current GSC2 database and obtain information needed to create MCO files.  The MCO files will then be FTPed to a VMS system for reprocessing by existing GSC2 software.

·         Have re-written the GetSourceByID task that took a GSC2 ID, accessed the COMPASS production database, and returned the object properties. The new application, GetSouceBy-ID2, will now accept either a single GSC2 ID or an input list from the command line.  If a list of IDs is specified, the output can be written to a log file named GETSOURCEBYID2_XXXX where XXXX uniquely identifies the output file.  Also modified the program to wait up to 600 seconds to receive a lock from the lock server for accessing the database.  In the past, if a lock were not available the application would fail immediately.

·         Wrote a document detailing the steps necessary to properly configure Microsoft Visual C++ with an Objectivity/DB project.

 

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

 
CALIBRATIONS: Classification 

·         Laidler used the GetSourceByID database access tool to retrieve observations for 3500 objects classified by the SDSS as nonstars, and the GSC2.2 as non-unanimous stars. She used this data to investigate alternative voting strategies that would improve results for non-unanimous classifications. Surprisingly, the IR plates appear to be the most accurate predictors of classification for this sample of objects. However, a similar sample of SDSS stars, classified by the GSC2.2 as non-unanimous nonstars, must be analyzed in order to rule out the possibility that the IR plates simply have a bias towards nonstar classifications.

·         She presented this work, along with some earlier results on the effectiveness of unanimity as a reliability indicator, in a talk entitled "Stars, Galaxies, and the Ballot Box" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America in Madison, Wisconsin, which was well received. She had useful discussions with other CSNA attendees concerning the Bayesian formulation of the classification procedure that will be used in the GSC2 classification paper, and she attended a short course on a combinatorial introduction to cluster analysis.

 

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

·         The latest version of the production GS Photometric Catalog-II -- including matched and non-matched objects -- is now available for GSC-II pipeline processing. This version contains ALL available observations to date; more data are expected to come in after the Jul 21-23 CTIO run (which will be covered by E. Costa), and, hopefully, in late fall, pending the ING/JKT proposal selection outcome. Out of 1794 total nominal target fields, the current catalog contains 1627 fields with more than 10 stars per sequence, and 29 fields with 6 to 9 stars per sequence.

 

 

 

 

GSC-II Science

·         (OATo) Delivered final data to the CRA project of C.Cacciari (Bologna Obs., Italy) and T. Kinman (NOAO). Produced proper motions based on GSC2 material for a sample of RR Lyrae stars and BHB giants within about 200 sq-deg (6 fields) towards the NGP to study the rotation of the galactic halo up to 10 kpc from the plane. Preliminary results will be presented at the Jenam2002 meeting in Porto.

·         Halo WD Project: Completed the calibration of the spectra observed during the last run at TNG in April. Found 21 new white dwarfs, 11 of them without H-alpha lines (mainly Helium WDs or ancient and very cool Hydrogen WDs). These results have been presented by D.Carollo at the NATO Advanced research workshop on White Dwarfs in Naples. The proposal for spectroscopic observations and NIR photometry at TNG (Canarias) during the second semester 2002 (AOT6) has been accepted.


 

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

 

 

 

PLATE PROCESSING STATUS

Survey

μ

Prefix

Total

SCANS

Month/Total

COMPRESS   Month/Total

PROCESS Month/Total

DBLOAD Month/Total
DBMATCH Month/Total
Notes

POSS-II J

15

XJ

897

0/902

0/897

0/902

0/897

0/897

S4

POSS-II F

15

XP

897

0/910

0/897

0/900

0/899

0/899

S4

POSS-II N

15

XI

897

0/882

4/872

1/872

0/784

285/377

S4

AAO-SES

15

XS

606

0/614

0/606

0/613

0/527

0/527

S4

PPARC-ER

15

ER

288

0/288

0/288

0/288

0/213

0/213

 

AAO-SR

15

GR

118

0/118

0/118

0/116

0/116

0/116

S2

UKST-SR

15

RS

112

0/50

0/0

0/0

0/0

0/0

S5

UKST-IR

15

IS

894

0/862

       0/862

0/862

95/772

72/760

S6

SERC-J/EJ

25

S

894

0/894

0/894

0/365

0/365

0/365

S1

SERC-J/EJ rescans

15

S

447

0/443

 

0/99

0/344

0/344

0/344

S1

SERC-QV

15

XV

94

0/94

0/94

0/94

0/90

0/90

 

POSS-I E

25

XE

936

0/818

completed

0/845

0/127

0/0

S3

POSS-I E

15

XE

936

0/129

0/0

0//108

0/28

0/0

S3

POSS-I O

15

XO

936

32/510

15/143

0/5

0/3

0/0

 

POSS-QV

25

N

611

0/611

0/611

0/254

0/2

0/0

 

Special

25

XX

4

0/4

0/4

0/0

0/0

0/0

 

Black Birch

25

XB

69

0/59

0/0

0/0

0/0

0/0

 

GPO Astrgph

25

XG

49

0/49

0/0

0/0

0/0

0/0

 

 

 

 

 

GSC-II RETRIEVALS for last 7 months

 

Dec 2001:                     169721                                                                          
Jan 2002:                     444834 
Feb 2002:                     290727 

Mar 2002:                     126745

Apr 2002:                      53387

May 2002:                      62853   

Jun 2002:                      50696