• Completed GSC-II processing of the southern quick-QV plate scans.
• The LMSI optical disk archive of GSC-I digital images has been discarded, making additional space available for STScI uses.

• Began collaborative project with Sloan Digital Sky Survey to intercompare GSC-II and SDSS catalogues.

• McLean returned from science leave.
• Beatrice Bucciarelli from OATo is visiting and working on GSPC-II and its publication.
• Mario Lattanzi from OATo is visiting and working on GSC-II classifications and GSPC-II.

• Investigated and filed Bad GS Alerts for twelve GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports). Ten of these were finelock failures and another was a false lock, all resulting from close pairs. The remaining object was fainter than expected because it was actually a compact group of three stars mistakenly classified in GSC-I as a single star.
• Monthly NGSS Users meeting was postponed.

• Supported more color checks for planned observations of Neptune and for rescheduled observations of Comet Lee.

• Continued scanning POSS-II N plates and started scanning the fourth shipment of UKST-IR plates.

• GAMMA2 was out of service for a week due to communications problems with the IEEE servo controller. The problem was traced to a faulty AC power adapter. The adapter was replaced and scanning has resumed.

• Completion of POSSII-J survey compression and CD-ROM mastering was delayed by the final validation of the GSC-I MOD archive (below).

• Completed final validation of the GSC-I MOD archive. This resulted in the rewriting several of the MODs and the discovery of a few errors in GSC-I database. The LMSI optical disk archive of GSC-I digital images has been discarded. making additional space available for STScI use.

• No progress reported in investigation of a GETIMAGE failure with the DSS-I, first reported by the NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.

• Completed processing the 15-micron Southern-QV plates.
• Began preliminary processing of some POSSII IV-N plates at STScI. The initial results show little differences with processing from the other surveys.

• Object-Matching benchmarking is ongoing. OATo is now testing a variation of the number of iterations the code performs with the goal of reducing the task time. Several discussions have taken place to address the tradeoffs of task architecture vs. matching quality. A more efficient task is currently being designed that will provide methods for matching both plates and reference catalogs using the COMPASS ObjectIndex which cross-links all source observations.
• The HSM system reinstallation is pending the completion of the GEMINI delivery due to the requirement of the disk reformatting.

• Created a number of routines to support astrometric calibrations. These help to determine which combination of plate model/projection/refraction produce the "best" calibrated parameters to make a mask. Once a mask is applied, these routines also help to determine (through comparisons to external reference catalogs) which mask produced the most accurate results. Work is still needed on comparing plate overlaps from the database, oop file and mco file input.
• Changed Plate_solution to allow the user to use only a percentage of the reference stars for the calibrations, reserving the remaining stars for checks on the calibration and for construction of better astrometric masks.

• A version of the classify and decision tree-making programs was made that allows any type of object to be classed, not just stars, nonstars, and defects. There still must be three object classes. The new programs allow iteration of classification, where one object type previously classified can now be reclassed into an addtional three object classes.
• A new study by ECF of classify results on XS and S plates again showed that galaxies are often classified only to an accuracy of 60%. Classify work will now concentrate on understanding why many decision trees give poor results, and how to improve them.
• Fixed a classification task bug that had caused a software crash under certain interpolation conditions. Delivered the new executable to OATo and ECF.

• Completed a new release of GSPC-II containing the most recent reduced data. The catalog includes all observations with formal magnitude errors less than 0.05 from CTIO, KPNO, La Palma, ESO, and Lowell observatories. The new catalog has been installed at all GSC-II production sites.
• Currently just 25 northern fields have fewer than ten stars and only six are still empty.
• Continued reprocessing of Wise Observatory data.
• Modified definitions in proc_info_flag to more cleanly support the photometric calibration information (independent variable, algorithm, extrapolation method).

• Modified the APPLY_CALIB task so that, with the exception of the top-level program, the same code will run on both VMS and NT, using conditional compilation where appropriate. This will simplify maintenance of the task, and make it possible to compare experimental results obtained on the two platforms. The procedures required to accomplish this were documented so as to facilitate porting the next tasks. This task is still in VMS develop and will be included in the next software delivery.
• Made a few improvements to the ApplyCalib task on NT. These include: improving the user interface; checking that objects in the original GSC I (not reprocessed plates) will not have their positions, magnitudes, classification changed by ApplyCalib; changing the photometric calibration to support the use of the general function to calibrate the plate (read in from the GSH file or read directly from the table); allowing the general function to be used only in the extrapolation zone; and improving the overall error handling.
• An effort is underway to make the library that reads the GSH files on NTcallable from Fortran, C and C++. A number of difference options have been tried, but none are totally satisfactory at the moment.

• This month much effort went into understanding the magnitude equation for GSC II proper motions in the Blanco 1 field. Once understood, corrections for a magnitude term were applied to the GSC II proper motions, which now give a more circular distribution for cluster and field star populations in the vector point diagram.
• Performed error analysis of GSPC-II observations in preparation for publishing a description of the catalog. Compared and made regression analyses of GSPC-II observations in common among the major observatories; also compared GSPC-II with GSPC-I observations and external data from the literature.
• Sent 140 plate scans on DLTs to OATo and ECF for science processing. Prepared MODs with 20 scans for delivery to OATo.

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.

S2. This survey is an on-going low level-of-effort collaboration between the ST ScI and the AAO. About 25-50 plates have been added in each of the past few years.

S3. Low priority scans of the POSS-I -24 deg and -30 deg zones.

S4. Includes recent scans of better grade plates.

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 758,880,625)

P1. The current total has decreased because these numbers reflect re-processed data.