CASB Report for April, 2000

Highlights for Division Meeting.

· The total number of entries in the COMPASS database now exceeds a billion!

Community Affairs and Communications

·

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· Continuing to configure the new DB server.

· Completed GEMINI employee performance evaluations.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Six new GSPRs (Guide Star Problem Reports) were received this period. Four of the problems were fine lock failures due to close binaries. Another GS was fainter than expected possibly due to its proximity to the bright star Canopus, leading to an overestimate of its brightness. Bad GS Alerts were filed for each of these GSPRs. The sixth GSPR was just received and is still under investigation.

· Continuing to work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, to be made available to STIS, ACS and COS for cycle 10. Initial results shown to Jerry Kriss and Claus Leitherer of the STIS team, who had only positive feedback.

· Received the go-ahead to file an OPR to have a button installed on the CS's toolbox to fire up the GUI. Waiting to learn the priority assigned to the OPR and to hear about when it should be implemented.

· Meanwhile, still collaborating with the ESS group working on the Visual Target Tuner. Receiving comments from both CS’s and PI’s for improvements to the VTT GUI. Concerns about Bright Objects are not limited to spacecraft safety, but also include interference with the observations.

NGST Guiding Studies

· Alessandro Spagna visited for the month of April, working on the NGST Guide Star report.

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Continued scanning POSSI-O plates between ROE shipments.

· Scanning slowed due to continuing GAMMA2 problems.

· Returned two plate shipments to ROE containing UKST-IR and AAO-SES plates. A large shipment from ROE is in transit.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· GAMMA 1 continues to maintain nominal performance.

· Hardware testing to uncover the GAMMA 2 problems is continuing. A problem with positioning of the laser in the laser monitor (photo diode used to measure high frequency laser intensity fluctuations) detector was corrected. A pixel counting problem still exists. Results of more testing point to problems with either the servo box or the pixel pulse gate. Tests are planned to determine exactly which piece of equipment is malfunctioning.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Awaiting the receipt, scanning, and compressing of the final plate from Palomar before the last four J plates can be archived. Meanwhile, compression of POSS-II N AAO-R and PPARC-ER plates continues.

Archive Maintenance

· Completed archiving 15-micron scans of SERC-J plates.

Software Development

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

GSC-II

Plate Processing

· Processing of the POSS-I red plates continues at a reduced pace.

· Some minor alterations were made to the processing script in order to eliminate some unneeded tasks and to streamline production.

COMPASS Database

· Production Object-Matching has completed 1289 plates.

· The Apply_Calibs task has now applied the latest astrometric and photometric calibrations to 1306 plates in the COMPASS Database.

· There are 1.089 billion objects from plates loaded into COMPASS. A utility will be developed in the near term to assess the number of unique sources detected from the completed set of matched plates.

· Cloned the subset of the COMPASS production Federated Database (FDB) into a test calibration FDB. This FDB will serve as a testing ground for calibration development and QA utilities.

· The CIQA utility, an IDL interface to COMPASS was built and installed on COMPASS. It was successfully run in the interactive mode on the local FDB server. There are a few technical enhancements required for running this in production batch mode for routine QA as well as remote access to the calibration FDB. This tool will be used to analyze the quality of the GSC-2 catalog and systematic effects of the processing, calibration, and classification production tasks.

· Began to perform some cleanup operations on the COMPASS database in recalibrating and re- processing plates that had problems in either database activities or processing errors.

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Initial testing of a pre-correction equation to correct for Schmidt plate distortions looks promising. The use of this pre-correction improves the formal sigmas from the plate solution. Masks using this pre-correction are currently being made.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· Wrote a validation utility for training set files to perform a basic check on the data. Use of this utility resulted in the identification and correction of two small bugs in the XSPAM OOP access library that produced corrupt data when used with the IDL classification marking utilities. This explained the poor results obtained by all recent classification experiments.

CALIBRATIONS: Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)

· Beatrice Bucciarelli visited for a week in April, working on GSPC-II testing and publication.

· Defined a new plan for the catalog distribution that includes a full sky catalog with (B)VR aperture photometry, instead of a limited equatorial distribution. Currently, some QA tests are in progress.

· It is also part of the plan to have a duplicate database for all of the GSPC-II data (images and files). Each night DLT copies are to be sent to OATo.

· Built a three-dimensional (x, y and magnitude range) mask correction from the KPNO VR CCD photometry. Testing the reliability of the mask is in progress.

· Placed an option in the develop version of Photosol that allows the user to have more flexibility in selecting which colors (B-V) or (V-R) to use for the reference stars. The default method uses the color closest to the bandpass of the plate.

· Added a field for magnitude errors to one of the pipeline files, to support future experimentation with photometric calibrations.

CALIBRATIONS: Apply_Calibs:

· Cleaned up the output files (did, stat and anomaly), removing some un-important data and also adding more numbers to better explain how the calibration performed.

GSC-II General Software Development

· Completed testing and delivered a build of pipeline software including: ApplyCalib, Deblender, Features, Findcat, Inventory, Photosol, and Plate_solution tasks; the Rcat standalone catalog staging utility; several underlying software libraries; and the XSPAM IDL user environment. This build corrected several small bugs, and enhanced the catalog functionality for the GSPC2 and Tycho2 catalogs.

· The contents of this delivery were also provided to visiting collaborators at OATo and ECF, for installation there.

GSC-II Science

· Daniela Carollo visited for three weeks in April, working on identifying high proper motion halo white dwarf stars. She presented a review of her work to CASB staff.

· Morrison submitted the paper, "The Guide Star Catalog, Version 1.2: An Astrometric Re-calibration and Other Refinements," to the AJ.

· Re-ran eight plates near the south galactic pole with the newly delivered software and the new GSPC II. Initial testing, using these plates and comparing theoretical star counts to the computed star counts, looks good. ‘

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

SCANNING

Survey		Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897		898	0	898	100		1
POSS-II F	897		907	0	907	100	S4	1
POSS-II N	897		787	0	787	88		1
AAO-SES	606		606	0	606	100	S4	1
PPARC-ER	288		270	0	270	94		1
AAO-SR	118		118	0	118	100	S2	-
UKST-IR	894		404	8	412	46		2
SERC-J/EJ	447		443	0	443	99	S1	2
POSS-I E	106		106	0	106	100	S3	3
POSS-I O	880		86	29	115	13		3
Rescans			18	0	18

• 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. Another 30 plates have been added to replace those that were repaired before inclusion in DSS-I.
• S2. This survey is an on-going low level-of-effort collaboration between the STScI 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.

COMPRESSION

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	893	0	893	99		2
POSS-II F	897	877	0	877	98		1
POSS-II N	897	140	39	179	20		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	902	0	902	100		4
POSS-II F	897	878	0	878	98		3
POSS-II N	897	166	28	194	22		4
AAO-SES	606	576	0	576	95		3
PPARC-ER	288	250	0	250	87		3
AAO-SR	109	0	0	73	67		4
UKST-IR	894	0	0	1	0		5
SERC-J/EJ	894	892	0	892	100
SERC-J/REPAIR	48	48	0	48	100
SERC-J/15mu	449	362	87	449	100		5
POSS-I E	933	928	0	928	99		2
POSS-I REPAIR	198	198	0	198	100		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	105	16	121	14		3
POSS-QV	613	0	0	0	0		3
POSS-II J	897	887	0	887	99	G1	1
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II N	897	44	0	44	5		4
SERC-J/EJ	894	822	0	822	92		1
South-F	894	815	0	815	91		1
UKST-IR	894	2	0	2	0		4
South-SR	118	110	0	110	93		2
South-QV	94	94	0	94	100		2

• G1. Plate processing is nearly complete. Efforts are now concentrated on recalibration

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (total number entries = 1,089,000,000)

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I E	880	5	0	5	1		3
POSS-QV	613	0	3	3	0		3
POSS-II J	897	510	1	511	57		1
POSS-II F	897	743	0	743	83		1
POSS-II N	897	3	1	4	0		4
SERC-J	894	128	0	128	14		1
South-F	894	473	0	473	53		1
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		4
South-SR	109	13	0	13	12		2
South-QV	94	57	0	57	61		2

GSC-II Dataset for V2.1.1 delivery (1791 Fields, 3438 plates) (P1)

Item	Count	% done	Notes
Plates available	3417	99
Plates processed	3355	98
DB Load	1907	55
Current Calibration or Recalibration	1887	55

• P1. Defined as all 897 POSS-II fields with 1794 plates plus 894 s
• Southern fields minus the 72 southern equatorial fields with 1644 plates.

GSPC-II OBSERVATIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	559	0	559	96	P1	1
POSS-II	314	169	0	169	54		1
SERC	894	868	0	868	97		1

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	559	0	559	99	P1	1
POSS-II	314	169	0	169	54		1
SERC	894	868	0	868	97		1

• P1. The current totals have been revised from earlier ones.