CASB Report September 2002

 

Highlights for Division Meeting

·         The CDROM, “The Making of GSC II,” produced at OATo with CASB collaboration, is now available.

 

Community Affairs and Communications

·         Received the labeled copies with jackets of the GSC2M CDROM from manufacturer.

·         Supported several tours of the plate vault during the month, highlighted by a visit from Barry Blumber who is the current director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

 

 

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

·         Final agreement reached between ODM and ESS on home division assignments of staff in new organization. There will  be no changes at this time.

 

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

·         Reviewed 6 new Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period.  Of these, four were fine lock failures. The other two were search failures: a blend near the globular cluster, 47 Tuc, and a small star cluster near the LMC. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

·         Continued to update the keywords of the header files.

 

NVO Development Studies

·         Greene continued to support NVO activities in coordination with the JHU – SDSS archive team.

·         Collaborating with Rick White in support of research and testing of COMPASS Web Service application, GetSourceByID2 , to access observation parameters by GSC2 name identifiers.

 
NGST Development Studies

·         No activity

 

                                      DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

 

Plate Scanning

·         Completed scanning the southern UKST IR plates and plates of northern IR (N) fields that were taken with the UK Schmidt Telescope to complete the northern survey.  Resumed scanning the POSS-I O (blue) survey plates

 
GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

·         GAMMA2 continues to operate smoothly.  Two instances of mechanical failures occurred during the month.  Replacement of the failed parts, actuators, was straightforward and downtime was minimal.  Actuators are key components in a heavily used mechanical system.

·         Scanning operations on Gamma1 continued without interruption during the previous month.

 

Data Compression/CD Production

·         Compressing of POSSI-O plate scans continued, but CD production has not resumed.

·         Still investigating the failure of the Young Minds CDROM writer. Continued running tests in writing CDROM's for the XDSS on Plextor to ensure the proper settings and compatibility with existing operating systems and software.

·         Copied compressed POSSI-O (XO) data from 24 un-mastered CDROMs to the CASBRAIDTEC, adding 83 regions to the online archive.

·         Replied to one helpdesk request for support.

 

 

GSC-II

 

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

·         As of 30-Sep-2002 there were 1,041,467,505 unique objects in the GSC2, which is over 2 TB in size. 

·         As of 30-Sep-2002, 5661 GSC2 plates are loaded into the COMPASS database; 5166 of these plates are matched.    Currently performing database operations on four different plate surveys: POSS-II N, UKST I, POSS-I E and O (red and blue).

·         Performed database QA on some test and research fields (mostly POSS-I and POSS quick V), loaded into the database several years ago, and found that they required recalibrations and new matching.  This work is in support of planned testing of a proper motion algorithm. 

·         Continued loading external reference catalogs. Decided to average GSPC-II observations before loading.

·         Began planning for ingest of GSC1 into an SQL database. 

·         Loading and matching POSS-I selected fields for determination of proper motions.

 

Calibrations : Astrometry

·         Delivered preliminary proper motion results for targeted southern fields to OATo. 
·         OATo found that the first results using simple ra and dec differences are very encouraging.
·         OATo requested additional pm calibrations for selected NGP fields with POSS-I overlaps.

 

Calibrations : Classification 

·         Continuing port of the object classifier application from VMS to Windows 2000.

 

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

·         Completed initial testing of a program that will access the current GSC2 database and obtain information needed to create MCO files for calibration purposes.  Have released the initial version of the software to the CASB group for further testing and evaluation.

·          (OATo ) Submitted two observing proposals:

o        CTIO - 3 nights to complete southern program; one more application, for 4 nights, is foreseen for semester 03B);

o        JKT - 6 nights to complete northern program (56 targets). Scheduled JKT run Oct 2-11 to observe remaining 100 northern fields.

·         Loomis is planning to take the second half of the October observing run.

·         (Garcia) Reduced the CTIO 0.9m telescope data from an extension of the July run.  As the seeing was very bad, only one of three nights was useful.

·         Incorporated six GSC2 southern (B, V, R) sequences into the catalog. Sent the data to OATo, as well as the tapes of the raw data from CTIO runs 24 and 26.  (No photons were obtained from Run 25.)

 

GSC-II Science

·         Sept. 19-25,  D. Carollo visited Simon Hodgkin at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (UK) in order to define the observing schedule for the spectroscopic follow up of the halo WDs candidates that will be observed with the 3.5m TNG at the beginning of October.

·         Alessandro, Ronald, Mario and Ricky attended the workshop in Gressoney, Italy, on "GAIA Spectroscopy: Science and Technology," Sept. 8-12, and gave the following presentations:

o        Alessandro presented a couple of talks regarding proper motions surveys based on GSC-II material;

o        Spagna A, Cacciari C., Drimmel R., Kinman T., Lattanzi M., Smart R., "Galaxy structure and kinematics towards the NGP;"

o        Lattanzi M., Carollo D., Spagna A., Hodgkin S., McLean B., Smart R, "Faint and exotic objects in GAIA: results from GSC-II."

 

                                          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

Completed

Completed

Completed

Completed

Completed

S4

POSS-II F

15

XP

897

Completed

Completed

Completed

Completed

Completed

S4

POSS-II N

15

XI

883

Completed

Completed

5/878/99

0/793/90

144/774/88

S4

UKST north IR

14

IN

14

    Completed

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

S7

AAO-SES

15

XS

606

Completed

Completed

Completed

0/527/87

0/527/87

S4

PPARC-ER

15

ER

288

Completed

Completed

Completed

0/213/74

0/213/74

 

AAO-SR

15

GR

118

Completed

Completed

0/116/98

0/116/98

0/116/98

S2

UKST-SR

15

RS

112

0/50/45

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

S5

UKST-I

15

IS

894

3/894/99

       0/862/96

20/866/97

     24/859/96

22/842/94

S6

SERC-J/EJ

25

S

894

Completed

Completed

0/365/41

0/365/41

0/365/41

S1

SERC-J/EJ rescans

15

S

447

0/443/99

 

0/99/22

0/344/77

0/344/77

0/344/77

S1

SERC-QV

15

XV

94

Completed

Completed

Completed

0/90/96

0/90/96

 

POSS-I E

25

XE

818

Completed

Completed

Completed

58/398/49

34/46/6

S3

POSS-I E

15

XE

129

    Completed

    Completed

Completed

0/9/7

0/9/7

S3

POSS-I O

15

XO

936

31/592/63

0/143/15

142/409/44

102/105/11

2/2/0

 

POSS-QV

25

N

611

Completed

Completed

0/254

0/2/0

0/0/0

 

Special

25

XX

4

Completed

Completed

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

 

Black Birch

25

XB

69

Completed

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

 

GPO Astrograph

25

XG

49

Completed

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

0/0/0

 

 

  • S1. Low priority program to rescan crowded fields (|b|<30) originally done with 25 mu scans.  The total number of S scans includes the 2 for the LMC and SMC plus 4 others with |b|>30 performed for research or STIS BOP support.  Another 30 plates have been added to replace those that were repaired before inclusion in DSS-I.
  • S2. This survey is an on-going low level-of-effort collaboration between the STScI and the AAO.
  • S3. Low priority scans of the POSS-I -24 deg and -30 deg zones.
  • S4. Includes recent scans of better grade plates.
  • S5.  Low priority scans of the moderately short exposure R plates from the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way.
  • S6.  Includes UKST-IR plates from the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds (1978-1985) and the I-Survey of the Southern Sky (1990-xx).
  • S7. IR plates taken with the UK Schmidt to complete the POSSII-N Survey.