Community Affairs and Communications

• ASP has extended an invitation for Meakes to give another demonstration of RealSky at the "Northeast Astronomy Forum", Sufferin, New York in May. Preparations are being made to attend.

• Met with Fred Gillett (GEMINI project manager) to discuss personnel issues and GSC 2.0 delivery schedule. As a result of a slip in commissioning activities (late instrument delivery and Skycat server installation), they do not require us to meet an April 1 delivery. In order to accommodate improved photometric calibrations for the selected fields, this delivery will now begin in late April and will be phased over a 1 month period.
• Completed vacating G17. Moved all tape and MOD cabinets in N112C to N112. Move of LMSI cabinets to intermediate-term storage in Bloomberg in progress.
• Consultant Alessandro Spagna visited in February and March working on NGST Guide Star issues. He will return in April for NGST detector workshop.
• Reviewed candidate resumes for GEMINI and STIS BOP positions.
• Met with Benoit Pirenne from ST-ECF who visited to discuss GSC-II and DSS-II project status. Decision made to begin sending POSS-I E scans for processing when current SERC-J is completed. Also included discussions on possible migration of DSS to DVD-R.
• Met with Admin/contracts to resolve budgets and streamline GSC/DSS licensing.

HST Operations

• Investigated and filed Bad GS Alerts for 11 GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports). Of these, four were finelock failures. Two problems were due to misclassified blends. Three GSs were too faint to achieve finelock. One pair failed the coarse mode angle check for unexplained reasons.
• Participated in the monthly NGSS Users meeting.

• Generated special finder charts in multiple bandpasses for 198 Cycle 8 STIS fixed targets.
• Produced similar charts for a field containing a deep GSPC-II sequence for a guide to estimate colors and magnitudes of objects in the STIS fields.
• Consulted on the problem of PRESTO determining BO alerts from GSC-I crowded regions covered only by short-exposure plates.

• Implemented Mendez galactic structure model and modified it to produce star counts in the DSS plate bandpasses (F,J) as well as the near-IR (J,H,K) for NGST.
• Began comparison of this model with Besancon model and available observational data.

Plate Scanning

• Scanned plates from the latest Palomar and ROE shipments along with a few POSS-I plates.
• ROE has agreed to speed up delivery of plate shipments to us.

• A brief interruption in scanning on GAMMA 2 was experienced recently. Power was lost when a circuit breaker tripped on two different occasions. A minor reconfiguration of power cords was all that was required to bring the circuit back into specifications. No failures have been noted since the reconfiguration.

• Shipped 175 CD-ROM volumes of the POSSII-J survey to CADC for copying this month.

Software Development

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

Plate Processing at ECF and STScI

• At STScI, some modifications have been made to enhance the processing scripts for both 15 and 25 micron scans. A check has been added to the call to rank_features in order to avoid memory problems associated with very crowded fields. The processing script was also changed to determine the correct sky mask to use in processing southern blue plates.
• We have begun to process the POSS-I E survey. Some peculiarities have been noted but the over all processing has gone very well with good results.
• The ECF pipeline has been successfully run on 1783 plates, including 153 processed in March. This month’s production rate is slightly better than last month’s due to mixing of low and high galactic latitude plates, and processing of first generation scans.
• OATo has received 1536 DID reports of processed plates from ECF. OATo used these files to create a catalog in the DIRA environment containing the most important 56 elements of the reports. From these data OATo staff obtained global statistics to analyze photometric and astrometric errors from the standard pipeline for different plate surveys and scan types.
• OATo staff developed and tested IDL code for displaying VIM and PIM images in a Windows NT environment.

• Completed installation of new HSM software. Testing in progress.
• A test delivery of exported data in SKYCAT format was sent to ESO for validation.
• Testing of ObjectMatching code found program failure modes - OATo investigating.
• Continued development work on loading Plate Metadata into the database.
• Database now contains 650,000,000 entries!

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

• Wrote a command procedure that consolidates all programs needed to make a decision tree into a single easy-to-use process. Also added enhancements to the point and click IDL/mouse tool that marks training set objects. This software should be ready for general use in early April.

• Experiments with applied photometry revealed problems with accepted photometric fits in a magnitude range adjacent to the extrapolation regions. Experiments with the general function indicated high sensitivity to the quality, quantity, and depth of the photometric calibrators, which hampered efforts to produce a standard, hands-off prescription for photometry.
• A new extrapolation algorithm, implemented by adding two artificial points corresponding roughly with the limiting magnitude, appears promising and much more stable than the general function.
• A detailed error algorithm for photometry has been developed, however, in the near term a simple algorithm will be used. A number of tests are underway for determining typical errors due to extrapolation, distance objects are from the sequence, and errors in the measured integrated density.
• A vignetting study using the Tycho catalogue was inconclusive because of saturation of the bright star images. Submitted a new KPNO proposal for CCD photometry across an entire equatorial plate.
• OATo staff submitted proposals for observing GSPC-II sequences with poor or no observations to the 2.15m at CSLEO (AR), 1m JKT and 2.5m INT at La Palma.
• OATo staff reprocessed 20 GSPC-II fields, generated a new DIRA catalog and shared it with STScI.

• Continued copying high-priority science fields to MOD for delivery to OATo colleagues.
• As decided in January with representatives of the OATo, large and short-term scientific programs have been started using either data extracted from the pipeline and/or the original plate information. The programs' PIs internal to the GSC-II cooperation are R. Mignani (with S.Zaggia-ESO) and N. Fourniol (with P. Guillout, Strasbourg Observatory).
• Cluster membership as determined from GSC II proper motions has been compared with x-ray detections in the field to study the x-ray properties of the open cluster Blanco 1. This work will be presented at a conference in Palermo Italy in May.

SCANNING
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	895	1	896	99.9		1
POSS-II F	897	881	7	888	99		1
POSS-II N	897	723	30	753	84		1
AAO-SES	606	587	0	587	97		1
PPARC-ER	288	252	0	252	88		1
AAO-SR	109	109	0	109	100	S2	-
UKST-IR	894	50	8	58	6		2
SERC-J/EJ	447	413	0	413	92	S1	2
POSS-I E	112	74	11	85	76	S3	3
POSS-I O	880	0	4	4	5		3

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.
 
 

COMPRESSION
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	687	64	751	84		2
POSS-II F	897	868	0	868	97		1
POSS-II N	897	0	0	0	0		3
AAO SES	606	572	0	572	94		1
PPARC ER	288	245	0	245	85		1
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		3

MO DISK ARCHIVING
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	740	41	781	87		4
POSS-II F	897	460	156	616	69		3
POSS-II N	897	0	4	4	4	1	4
AAO-SES	606	245	0	245	40		3
PPARC-ER	288	127	0	127	49		3
AAO-SR	109	0	0	0	0		4
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		5
SERC-J/EJ	894	892	0	892	100		-
POSS-I E	880	835	0	835	95		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	880	0	66	66	2		3
POSS-QV	613	0	0	0	0		3
POSS-II J	897	752	17	769	86		1
POSS-II F	897	775	33	808	90		1
POSS-II N	897	0	0	0	0		4
SERC-J	894	512	114	626	70		1
South-F	894	659	29	688	77		1
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		4
South-SR	109	14	0	14	13		2
South-QV	94	13	0	13	14		2

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I E	880	0	0	0	0		3
POSS-QV	613	0	0	0	0		3
POSS-II J	897	351	0	351	39		1
POSS-II F	897	605	0	605	67		1
POSS-II N	897	0	0	0	0		4
SERC-J	894	0	0	0	0		1
South-F	894	436	0	436	49		1
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		4
South-SR	109	5	0	5	5		2
South-QV	94	0	0	0	0		2

GSC-II Dataset for V2.0 delivery (117 Fields)
 

Item	Count	% done	Notes
Plates available	230/234	97
Plate processed	226	95
DB Load	131	56
Photometric Calib	157	67
Astrometric Calib	0	0
Reclassification	0	0

GSPC-II OBSERVATIONS
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	565	4	569	97		1
POSS-II	142	109	28	137	96		1
SERC	894	891	0	891	99		1

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS
 

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	563	0	563	96		1
POSS-II	142	109	28	137	96		1
SERC	894	654	103	757	85		1