CASB Report for July, 2000

Highlights for Division Meeting

· Received, scanned, compressed and archived the plate for the final POSS-II J field.

· Successfully completed production Object Matching on 1900 loaded plates in COMPASS.

Community Affairs and Communications

· B. McLean attended the “Mining the Sky” conference at ESO, Garching, 31 July 31 – 4 Aug.

· V. Laidler visited OATo 10-14 July to work primarily with R. Smart on the classification project.

· B. Bucciarelli is visiting from OATo and is working on the GSPC-II publication.

· Conducted tours of CASB for the HST flight software team.

· A review of the CASB WWW pages has been initiated. There is a plan in place to update the current WWW contents, repair broken links, and upgrade the current sites to reflect the current status of the GSC-2 project.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· The 6^th annual GSC-II meeting has been scheduled for Oct 19-20 2000.

· Completed annual performance evaluations.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Received nine Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) near the end of the period, but have not yet reviewed them.

· Continuing work on the Bright Object tool for the Visual Target Tuner (VTT). Jesse Doggett, one of the developers of the VTT, has consulted and helped put together some very rough estimates of what will be involved in completing the project and how long it might take. Plan on having a meeting with McLean, Asbury, and the developers to discuss this soon.

· Provided a J-F to V-R color transformation for northern and southern surveys for STIS BOP. This equation is valid just for a well-known and restricted stellar population.

· J. Morrison is now part of the NGST Operations Concept Committee and has been helping with the Concept document and reading background material on the NGST project.

· Morrison and Sturch participated in an NGST Guidestars splinter meeting.

· A research project is now underway for obtaining a list of target and guide stars to be used for testing the alignment of the NGST guiding camera. This initial list is being made using the TYCHO 2 catalog. At a later date we will use the GSC-II for this test (if needed).

· Color transformation from B-V (Tycho) to V-K was provided to estimate the K magnitude of Tycho stars for NGST support.

· There were difficulties this month with regard to DSS access due to a combination of two separate failures. The CASB CDROM jukeboxes “unlimited” licenses expired and the software vendor has recently gone out of business and we are unable to get this corrected. At the same time, the AB jukeboxes were experiencing hardware failures resulting in only limited service for a period of 2-3 weeks. A plan to migrate the data from CDROM to hard disk in being prepared and will be implemented as soon as possible.

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Scanned POSSI-O plates until the shipment of POSS-II plates via USNO was available.

· Scanning this new shipment, which contains POSSII-N plates plus five better plates of POSSII J and R fields including one for the lone J field for which we had no plate. We still need to acquire the accepted plate for field 377 of the POSSII-J survey.

· Received a shipment of UKST-IR plates at the end of the period.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· Plate scanning operations for GAMMA1 have been nominal for the previous month with no downtime recorded. Plate scanning on GAMMA2 was interrupted briefly due to a mechanical hardware failure. The part was identified and repaired quickly; production scanning was resumed within one day with nominal results.

· At the end of the period, condensation from the building cooling system leaked into the GAMMA2 room. Some electronics were damaged and some bearings on GAMMA2 were corroded. Damage is being corrected.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Compressed the final POSS-II J plate, which was received and scanned this month. Archived the last set of four J plates. Meanwhile, compression of POSS-II N continued.

· Found that the software that updates and appends to the XDSS index file during the process of building new headers for the CDROM set is not fully Y2K compliant! Plates taken after 31 Dec 1999 are recorded in this index file as epoch 1900. The headers themselves are prepared correctly however, and record the epoch as 2000.

· Teaching colleague to compress the UKST-IR Survey scans.

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

· Continued making excellent progress on processing the POSSI red plates. Started to perform cleanup processing of any unprocessed plates as well as those that suffered problems in processing. It is expected that all POSSI red plates will be completed prior to the next monthly report.

· Performed QA on calibrations of the plates scheduled for the next export catalog of GSC-II. Identified a relatively small sample needing new calibrations. These were completed and applied to the data. Problem plates were also checked and failures in the apply calibrations task running on NT were traced to an unusual failure mode with the VMS pipeline processing. The ten affected plates were reprocessed and the calibrations applied.

COMPASS Database

· Successfully completed production Object Matching on 1900 loaded plates in COMPASS.

· Ran ApplyCalibs production task on COMPASS plates for improved photometric calibrations.

· The GSC 2.1.0 export catalog production is currently underway and is almost complete. The delivery to ESO, GEMINI, and OATo will proceed over the next two weeks, consisting of a large majority of the sky covered, in one or two bandpasses.

· Upgraded the CIQA software on CHART and did several test runs.

· The RAID system reached full capacity on one set with the completion of ApplyCalibs for the 'N0' sky area. COMPASS administration task for compacting database files restored several Gigabytes, but we are nearing the current disk limits.

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Did more analysis on better determining the form of the distortion equations. As part of this work, wrote a non-linear least squares routine to better determine the distortion equation coefficients. A study using Fourier transforms is now underway.

· Modified the filter routine to make it more robust and allow more user qualifiers.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· At OATo Laidler worked primarily with Smart on the classification project. Several useful discussions with Smart, Spagna, and Lattanzi provided further insight into issues regarding classification probabilities, sensitivities of the ranking process, multi-plate classification, and which lines of investigation to pursue next.

· Tested a new decision tree against a trustworthy galaxy catalog and found it to perform more poorly than the current decision tree. A "faint only" decision tree was built and found to perform more poorly than random perturbations of the current production decision tree on faint objects.

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

CALIBRATIONS: Apply_Calibs:

GSC-II General Software Development

GSC-II Science

· Prepared and sent four MODs requiried for research to OATo.

· Daniela Carollo’s search for high proper motion objects in two regions suitable for summer observations (137 and 100) has provided 15 candidates. The spectral follow-up for these objects will be made probably during this week to the Apache Point Observatory.

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

SCANNING

Survey		Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897		898	3	901	100	S4	1
POSS-II F	897		907	3	910	100	S4	1
POSS-II N	897		787	51	838	93		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-SR	112		50	0	50	45	S5	3
UKST-IR	894		462	0	462	52		2
SERC-J/EJ	447		443	0	443	99	S1	2
POSS-I E	106		106	0	106	100	S3	3
POSS-I O	936		141	34	175	19		3
Rescans			18	5	23

• 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.
• S5. Low priority scans of the moderately-short exposure R plates from the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way.

COMPRESSION

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	893	4	897	100		2
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100	C1	1
POSS-II N	897	227	24	251	28		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

• C1. Completed in May, 2000, but not included in the earlier report.

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	225	53	278	31		4
AAO-SES	606	587	0	587	97		3
PPARC-ER	288	250	0	250	87		3
AAO-SR	109	73	0	73	67		4
UKST-IR	894	60	89	149	17		5
SERC-J/EJ	894	892	0	892	100
SERC-J/REPAIR	48	48	0	48	100
SERC-J/15mu	449	449	0	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	936	678	202	880	94	G1	3
POSS-QV	613	2	0	2	0		3
POSS-II J	897	887	0	887	99		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. POSS-I E totals include 66 plates processed before 2000 which will be reprocessed.

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	2	0	2	0		3
POSS-II J	897	511	0	511	57		1
POSS-II F	897	743	0	743	83		1
POSS-II N	897	4	0	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.n 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 the 894 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.