• Completed scanning the third shipment of UKST-IR plates; approximately 1/6 of the survey has been scanned.
• First astrometric and photometric recalibrations completed on the GEMINI test fields using the COMPASS database ApplyCalibs task.
• GSC 2.0 catalog access software and selected fields were delivered to GEMINI for analysis and integration testing with their telescope control system.

• McLean and Greene attended the June AAS meeting in Chicago.

• Rreached agreement with SDSS to perform intercomparisons of SDSS and GSC-II datasets for QA.

• Preliminary discussions with FermiLab director (John Peoples) about STScI hosting final SDSS archive

• McLean is on 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.
• OATo. DLT device successfully installed and tested on workstation GSC2. Software problems remain.

• Investigated and filed Bad GS Alerts for seven GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) plus three unofficial GS problems. Five of these were finelock, false lock, or loss of lock failures; three were search failures of which two were due to misclassified galaxies in the GSC. The other two are a pair of high proper motion stars with current positions that affected the HST roll angle.
• Participated in the monthly NGSS Users meeting.

• Supported color checks of stars in the vicinity of proposed observations of Jupiter and Neptune.

• Completed scanning the third shipment of UKST-IR plates and returned the shipment to ROE. Received the next shipment of this survey.
• Daytime scanning was limited due to possible effects of vibrations during reconstruction of the nearby entrance to the Muller building.

• Both GAMMAs operated within nominal tolerances this month.

• POSSII-J survey compression and CD-ROM mastering is nearing completion. The mastering process was delayed due to disruption of decompression procedures caused by hardware and configuration problems that have since been corrected.

• Final validation of the GSC-I MOD archive revealed some potential problems. A third of the problems have been resolved resulting in the re-archive of eight first-generation scans to MOD.
• Completed MOD archiving of "repaired" POSSI-E plate scans. These first-generation scans were repaired by correcting their shearing and chopping problems before they were included in DSS-I.

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

• Completed testing and delivered the software build containing the most recent versions of all the calibration tasks, auxiliary calibration utilities, and newly built executables of all the pipeline processing tasks. Executables were delivered to OATo and ECF over the network. Full use of this pipeline requires new and updated astronomical catalogs, which were brought to OATo by hand last month. Repeated attempts at network transfers of the catalogs from STScI to ECF have failed, and alternate approaches are being explored.
• Performed some troubleshooting and debugging activities for OATo and ECF in conjunction with the new delivery.
• Final report, "Statistical Studies on the Results Obtained with GSC2 Pipeline at ES0-ECF and STScI," is finished and will be put on the OATo web site.

• Production operations or the GEMINI delivery fields (~200 plates total) continues. The ApplyCalibs task was run for astrometric and photometric calibration on all of these plates minus 5 that still need to be loaded into the COMPASS database. Object-Matching has been completed on priority 1 and partially on priority 2 fields.
• The Object-Matching task has some performance issues that we are addressing to speed up the production processing of large numbers of plates by using the COMPASS database master index.
• The GSC-II export fast indexing was completed. The access time for very crowded fields was reduced by a factor of 3x in most cases. FITS queries complete on the order of 1 second or less.
• A new version of GSC-II access code was delivered to GEMINI along with a selected GSC-II field. GEMINI is currently reviewing the software and previewing the data files and data format.
• The HSM system was corrupted during a hardware installation. A new version of the OTG HSM software will be installed; all files on hard disk will be migrated to DLTs.

• New astrometric masks were created for XJ and XP plates. Apply_Calib on VMS and NT now can apply astrometric masks. The astrometric mask was applied to a set of test plates and overlapping positional plots were made. The swirls and many of the systematics have been greatly reduced; however, there remain systematics that probably result from the magnitude effect or plate dependent systematics. Work has been done on testing and quantifying the position dependent magnitude effect.
• The sigma of the fit from plate_solution and the number of stars used in the calibration is now reported to the GSH file.

• Several utilities to assist in hand classifying training sets to build improved decision trees were created, several at the request of the team at OATo. These include:
• An enhanced version of the point and click mouse tool, which operates on unsorted OOP files, permits more detailed examination of an object’s image and object parameters before classifying, and saves the hand classification information in a form that can be transferred to other plates;
• A utility to apply either the hand classification generated by the above tool, or a catalog classification in a simple ASCII format, to an OOP file;
• A utility to clear the hand or catalog classification digits for all objects in an OOP file;
• A diagnostic utility analyzing changes in classification by x, y, and magnitude.
• Informational header files to record the "metadata" about a training set or decision tree were prototyped and put into trial use. These are keyword-style files containing information such as the number of sources from which a training set or decision tree was created and information about those sources (scans, CCD images, catalogs).
• At OATo extensive tests were made to check the performance of hand made training sets custom made for the same plates to be classified, vs. default training sets made from generic plates with CCD observations. The hand made training sets varied from being slightly better than the default to being very much worse, and indicate a probable intermittent bug in the train set/decision tree making software that causes some decision trees to fail catastrophically. This problem will be investigated in the next month or two. For the hand made training sets, accuracy rates for galaxies varied between 60 and 96 percent depending on the training set and plate, as verified from matches with the NED extragalactic database.

• Made some code changes to photosol to support the baseline delivery of all pipleine tasks. These changes include some bug fixes and improvements to the interactive mode of rejecting stars.
• Adapting the task Apply_calib so that it will run both on NT and VMS with as few code differences as possible between the two platforms. When completed, this method will serve as the prototype for other tasks which need to run in both environments.
• Reprocessed four CTIO runs using the ARLO package. The processing rate was slower than originally planned due to external problems such as office remodeling, hardware connectivity, and a new TABLES package version.
• A KPNO proposal for the study of the Schmidt vignetting problem has been accepted; it received five nights at the 0.9 m telescope in January 2000.
• OATo. Completed and tested software to assign names to stars in GSPC-II. Started reduction of the last four nights from the ESO (1993) run 05. Improved the matching between different observations of the same field.

• Garcia installed the Lejeune library of synthetic spectra in IRAF/Synphot. He and Spagna are working on the color characterization of the GSC-II bandpasses, extending J-F and F-N color indices as a function of stellar metallicity, temperature and gravity.
• CRA activity. Carried out extensive classification testing on Coma and adjacent regions. Five regions reduced and sent to Napoli Group for study of weak line T-Tauri stars and the star forming Chamaeleon region.
• Hawkins compared proper motions of the Blanco 1 cluster to results of the Yale/San Juan Southern Proper Motion survey in the same area of sky. The results reveal a magnitude equation/correction that needs to be applied to the GSC II proper motions. The cluster luminosity function is also being studied.

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)