• Developed a production plan for completing a large GSC2 delivery by the end of the year.

• Michael Asbury transferred from PRESTO to CASB this month. He will be planning and developing the GSC-II user interface, especially for STIS-BOP analysis.
• Ordered a new PC to do processing now done on a Sun. We need an inexpensive and powerful machine to reduce photometric data derived from a large-format CCD image. This machine will run in Linux and will not be supported by the Institute.

• No new GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) were received this period.

• Started generating STIS-BOP planetary charts for the year 2000. Because the CD archive of POSS-II J compressed scans is essentially complete, revised software to extract images from this archive for use in making the charts. Currently testing the procedures.
• Investigating the requirements for the STIS Bright Object Protection GUI that will be used by the Contact Scientists when performing the BOP processing of programs.

• OATo studies progressing for the characterization of an "optimal" filter for the NGST guiding, in terms of maximum position accuracy associated with a sufficient probability of acquiring a Guide Star. Numerical simulations indicate that filters centered towards shorter wavelengths (about 1 micron) having wide bandpasses are preferred and compatible with predicted NIR star counts. Color transforms from the GSC-2 filters (JFN) to the Near IR bands have been produced (see Science section).

• Started scanning the sixth shipment of UKST-IR plates. Production was low due to problems with GAMMA2.

• Completed the plate archive inventory. Identified all multiple SERC J and ER plates plus a few missing plates that have now been ordered.

• GAMMA2 shear analysis revealed larger than acceptable values of 0.1 pixel for shear between adjacent multichannel passes. Full mechanical maintenance was performed on GAMMA2. but this did not result in any improvement in the shear. It is planned to perform a sequence of engineering scans using grated rulings and subsequent analysis of this data. Possible remedies to the shearing problem involve adjusting the frequency table and or the beam angle deflection.

• Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived.
• Completed analysis of compression methods for the POSSII-N survey. Completed the first four CDROMs of compressed scans for this survey.

• Of 38 POSS-I E scans retrieved for archiving to MOD, four have failed checksums on the rollback. This phenomenon is unexplained. For now, we are postponing the archiving of the problem scans and may rescan the plates, if necessary.

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

• Continued recalibration along with COMPASS database loading of previously processed data.

• The OTG HSM system extended drives were reconfigured. During this process there was a failure that resulted in deletion of a subset of COMPASS. This problem was corrected and all COMPASS files were recovered. The HSM is now is full operation managing the COMPASS database files, and plate processed OOP files.
• COMPASS production object-matching was resumed. This task is currently operating serially with the production loading.
• OATo delivered a new version of the Object Matching task (OM) for testing. Thanks to several software optimizations, the plate-to-plate matching has attained an improvement in speed of about 10 times. Further improvements will have to rely on the optimization of the interface library between OM and Compass DB.
• Developed a production plan for completing a large catalog delivery by the end of the year. We will complete loading of the remaining processed plates and then dedicate the system to object-matching all plates in COMPASS. The export task is scheduled to run the last 1-2 weeks of December.
• OATo delivered the first version of an IDL tool, CIQA (COMPASS Interface for Quality Assurance). Installation and testing is in progress at STScI.
• A user database for the south galactic pole will be cloned from the COMPASS production system. This database will facilitate ongoing development of astrometric and photometric calibration tasks as well as provide a safe working area that will not interfere with production operations. The IDL QA tool will also mainly work in this area. The plates for this area will be loaded into COMPASS pending the completion of GSC-2 year end delivery and plate processing of these fields.

• A new set of astrometric masks where created for the POSS-II J, POSS-II R, SERC-J, AAO-SES, PPARC-ER, AAO-SR and SERC-QV surveys. A set of software programs where created or existing code was modified to improve the determination of the astrometric mask, analyze the variance of the masks, compare masks, and improve the statistics on overlapping-plate positional residuals.
• Masks were created from various subsets of the surveys for the purpose of determining the final mask. The following types of mask were created and compared against each other: laser scans vs. white light scans, 15 micron scans vs. 25micron scans, POSSII-J vs. POSS-II R plates, PPARC-ER vs. AAO-SR plates, and SERC-J singlet corrector vs. SERC-J doublet corrector. It was determined that there is an insignificant difference between the plates created with laser and white light scans and 15 and 25 micron scans. There is a significant difference between the POSS-II J and POSS-II R plates, and the AAO-SES (original) plates and PPARC-ER (copy) plates. There is a small difference between the SERC singlet and doublet corrector plates. For now we will treat the plates with different correctors as the same for the purpose of determining a mask, but we leave open the option to separate them in the future.

• The problem of ranks bunching up at the 99% level is still being investigated, although it now looks to be due not to a software bug, but to oddities in object properties for some of the plate regions and features. Solutions to fix this problem are being proposed and explored.
• The problem of some of the manually made train sets/decision trees not working correctly for software in Torino is still being investigated.

• The new version of GSPC2 has been installed in production for pipeline plate processing. Identical versions have been distributed to OTA and ECF.
• The CCD photometry available for the field S862, was used to conduct several photometric tests to understand the nature of the discrepancy in the vignetting problem.
• One observing run at the Isaac Newton telescope (2.5m) at La Palma was performed at the beginning of the month with the primary goal of probing the faint end of the survey plate photometric response. The data is being processed. Another run of 6 nights at the JKT (1m) is in progress.

• Identified and corrected a minor bug in the APPLY_CALIB task in creating the name of the astrometric mask file. Also corrected the command line logic so that astrometric masks are ignored if astrometry is not being performed. Delivered the resulting task to BASE.
• Developed, tested, and delivered a standalone utility to write photometric sequence information into the GSH file. This was necessary because the naming convention used in the new GSPC2 does not preserve information about the sequences. This capability will likely be incorporated into PHOTOSOL at its next major release.

• All available scans requested by OATo and ECF colleagues have been sent.
• Proper motions were calculated for 6x6 square degree regions around the open cluster M39 and the upper Sco-Cen OB Association. For both clusters, proper motions do not show a distinctly identifiable grouping in the vector point diagram separate from the bulk of field stars, but in each case the reflex solar motion for nearby stars can be seen as separate from the bulk of field stars, and this in undoubtedly where both clusters lie. For M39, stars from the proper motion study of Platais (1996) have been matched to the GSC II results, in preparation for estimating systematic errors in the GSC II proper motions due to a magnitude equation.
• Recent recalibration of the photometry for the plates studied produced acceptable photometric results.
• Fabrizia Guglielmetti has joined the open star cluster project, and has started processing the important young southern cluster IC 2602.
• OATo generated a complete library of color transforms between the GSC-2 photometric system (JFN) and the standard photometric system BV(RI)cJHKKsL via synthetic photometry of the spectral library of Lejeune et al (1998). These transforms cover a wide range of temperature, gravity and metallicity. Within the appropriate ranges, the new transforms are consistent with the empirical ones used for the plate photometric calibration by the GSC-2 pipeline.

in DSS-I.

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.

Database load.

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 954731259)

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