• Recalibration of astrometry and photometry for fields as they are delivered to COMPASS has begun.

• Preparations continued for annual GSC-II meeting to be held in Garching (25-26 Oct). A preliminary agenda has been prepared. Three main topics will be discussed: pipeline/software status; operational activities with GSC2; and science projects. Thirty participants are expected for the meeting including Garcia, Greene, McLean, and Morrison from CASB.

• Wil O’Mullane, ESA ESTEC archive developer, is visiting STScI and developing a JAVA HTTP user interface to the GSC2 catalog.
• Nathalie Fourniol (ECF) has accepted an ESO/archive position starting 1 Oct.
• The PIXEL1 tape stacker drive was replaced and has been working nominally for several weeks.
• PIXELA CDROM jukebox is now operational.

• Received 15 GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) this period. Twelve of these were investigated and Bad GS Alerts filed for each. Five of the GSPRs involved fine lock or loss-of-lock problems due to close binaries, three were slightly resolved pairs misclassified as single stars in the GSC, three more were fainter than expected, and the remaining problem was blamed on a spoiled star. The other GSPRs are still under investigation.

• Consulted on the recent lack of bright object alerts for two of the four Trapezium stars for a STIS MAMA target. Found that these stars were not in the INCA entries of the GSC1 or the SAO catalog, the primary catalogs used by NGSS to generate BO alerts. Recommended that we add a more complete catalog to supplement the current catalogs for this purpose. Investigating the completeness and precision of Sky 2000 and other catalogs.

• Scanning the fifth shipment of UKST-IR plates.
• Returned two shipments of plates to ROE.

• Problems prevented normal scanning with GAMMA1 for several weeks. The scanning machine was timing out while waiting to lock into the proper position to make a y axis step. Mechanical adjustments along with tests to some software parameters are underway. At this time several test scans have been successful. A production scan has been started and is underway now. GAMMA2 scanning was nominal for the past month.

• Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived.

• Delivered the GSH_EDIT tool to the QUICKFIX environment to make it available for general use. This utility has not been fully tested, and leaves some functionality to be desired – however, it does make adding, deleting, and modifying records in a GSH file much easier than hand editing.
• Created a DCL script to check the GSH file for the presence of the scan and descendent number keywords, and automatically add them if necessary using the GSH_EDIT utility. This script will be incorporated into the processing scripts to ensure the presence of these keywords, which need to be present to populate the contents of the GSH files into COMPASS.
• Identified a set of GSH file naming related anomalies, and the necessary steps to correct them. Completed corrections for several well defined sorts of anomalies; corrections for the others are in progress. Corrections include modifications to GSH and PPD files, the PSI database, the MO and CD archives and their related header files.
• Identified and corrected a problem with the plate grade keyword for GSC2.1 plates. For many GSH files, this keyword is present with an integer value, rather than a string. This can cause processing software to crash. This problem exists for non-GSC2.1 plates also, and will be corrected for them as well as resources permit.

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

• The total number of plates processed at ECF now exceeds 2100. ECF production this month was slowed by problems in reprocessing old PIM files and by processing of a few low-galactic latitude plates. Some extra time has been spent in performing tests on the accuracy of the photometric calibration as well as on GSC2 science-related activities.
• At STScI, currently processing and troubleshooting GSC2.1 plates that had problems in earlier processing. Identified and are processing the remaining GSC2.1 fields. It is expected that these few plates should be completed well before the end of the year.

• Prototyped a Perl script to automatically update a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, where the value to update is provided as an argument to the script, and the page and row are determined by parsing the scan filename for region and survey. This technique can be used to assist with automatically tracking production on the NT side.
• Identified a list of 3449 scans that will constitute the GSC2.1 plate (scan) set. Added a flag to the PSI to facilitate record keeping. Generated both ASCII (on the VMS side) and Excel (on the NT side) versions of the list, sorted by COMPASS load status and by hemisphere.
• Recalibration of both astrometry and photometry for all fields as they are delivered to the COMPASS database has begun. The calibration tasks right now are running only on the VMS side, but complete ports to NT should be coming soon. Preliminary database loading of 11 plates has begun. Full-scale production should begin very shortly.

• COMPASS database production was halted for a complete database backup to DLT tape and server hardware upgrades. The hardware upgrades extended the online database storage to approximately 800GB.

• The Hierachical Storage Management system employed by the COMPASS database and server, OTG, is currently being rebuilt following the new disk expansion.

• The GSC2 export catalog is now on a newly formatted separate disk partition of 80GB. This area is reserved for serving catalog data via SkyCat WWW browser interface to support STIS BOP.

• As part of a collaborative work arrangement with ESA ESTEC archive developer, Wil O'Mullane, a JAVA HTTP user interface to the GSC2 catalog has been developed for analyzing positional accuracies and proper motions. This is a visual tool which provides methods for cross-comparisons between the Hipparchos, Tycho, and GSC-2 catalogs. It utilizes the same query interface as the SkyCat WWW tool and has provisions to be run both locally or via HTTP.
• Upgrade OATo COMPASS to Objectivity 5.1. New version of the DB code installed and working. Purchase orders for 180 GB disk for COMPASS prepared.

• No activity while Jane Morrison is on Maternity leave.

• Investigated handmade training sets that produced very bad results. Determined that for these training sets, the ranked features for the area_above_thresh(2:16) were zero for all objects in the training set. The decision-tree making program nonetheless produced nonzero coefficients for these objects. Investigation as to why those ranked features were zero in those training sets is ongoing in cooperation with ECF staff.

• Completed GSPC2 reduction for all STScI observations from the late 1980s to the present using the ARLO package. Thanks to Ayris, Amy and Mike
• The full DIRA catalog is in Torino where multiple observation matching and naming are expected to be completed this week.
• The preliminary results for the vignetting correction, using data from ESO Wide Field Imager (ESO), still show the wrong sign for the field S862.
• OATo delivered the latest GSPC-II catalog with matches of multiple observations including all reductions up to Jul 99. Those objects that were matched have been assigned names (i.e. S001-AAAC), which were then ingested into the original catalog. This system allows the inclusion of newly reduced data in a consistent way.

• Performed formal testing on the PLATE_SOLUTION, PHOTOSOL, REFRACTION, and APPLY_CALIB tasks on the VMS side, and corrected the minor bugs that were discovered in testing. Delivered these tasks, and their supporting libraries and task parameter files, to the BASE environment at STScI.

• Object Matching (OATo). Tests have been done to improve OM speed. The idea of reducing the number of search radii from three to two does not appear to have any significant effects on crowded fields. Alternative ways have been suggested (e.g., reducing the usage of files in favor of more core memory), but this would require changes to the OM code. In practice, the impact of OM speed on the GSC 2.1 schedule needs to be evaluated before code changes are considered.
• (OATo). Work is in progress on an IDL task for multi-plate QA on positions, magnitudes, and classifications. First results are already available and work has started on a version of the QA module that is capable of running in batch mode.

• Over 80% of the requested scan images have been sent to OATo.
• There has been no new work on Blanco 1; however, processing of other clusters continues. Working on a method to more easily get proper motions for large areas of sky in a single process. This is in preparation to get proper motions for M39 and Sco-Cen. All plates have now been processed for M39 in a 6 x 10-degree region, and for the upper Sco-Cen assoc in a 10 x 10-degree region. Started working on plates for IC 4756.
• OATo Received from Terranegra digital images of plates taken with the ESO Schmidt and scanned in Munster. These plates have been successfully processed with the GSC2 standard pipeline after proper conversions of the file format.
• GSC2-like proper motions in the field of the open cluster ST2 have been used to identify X-ray active cluster members. A paper is about to be submitted to A&A (Sciortino et al.)

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.