CASB Report for March, 2000

Highlights for Division Meeting.

· Object matching and application of photometric recalibrations for plates in the COMPASS database are progressing smoothly. The results will be included in the next GSC-II release.

Community Affairs and Communications

· McLean visited the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Group for update on plate scanning and archive activities.

· Morrison attended IAU Symposium 180: “Towards Models and Constants for Sub-Microarcsecond Astrometry” in Washington.

· Guglielmetti went to the Washington Area Astronomers meeting in College Park.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· McLean visited OATo for a project status review.

· Wil O'Mullane visited to continue development of JAVA user interface to the GSC-2 export catalogue and COMPASS.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

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

· Continuing to work on the requirements of the BOP GUI, which will be available for STIS, ACS and COS, in cycle 10. Currently developing a way to make Bright Object checking more automated for the Contact Scientist.

· Working with Jerry Kriss and Claus Leitherer of the STIS team to implement a tool that overlays a DSS display with the GSC-II and provides a table of magnitudes, colors, and coordinates. Planning an initial delivery of the tool for STIS team use in a few weeks.

· Also collaborating with Tony Krueger in ESS to develop the Visual Target Tuner, a component of the astronomer’s proposal tool. Investigating how PIs might use it for Bright Object checking.

NGST Guiding Studies

· Alessandro Spagna will visit for the month of April to work on the NGST Guide Star report.

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Completed scanning the 8^th shipment of UKST-IR plates; preparing a return shipment to ROE.

· Scanning slowed due to GAMMA2 problems.

· Received a printed list of accepted POSS-II plates from CalTech. Reviewed list, notified CalTech of a few discrepancies, and requested delivery of missing plates.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· Problems persist on GAMMA2. After nearly two months of nominal operations, problems showed up on three recent scans. These scans, which were rejected and re-scanned on GAMMA1, showed anomalous interline shearing at about the 0.1 pixel level. Mechanical adjustments along with a large number of test and engineering scans have failed to reveal the nature of this problem. Engineering scans specifically designed to measure interline and inter pass correlation's showed good performance yet the problems persisted in test production scans. More tests and mechanical adjustments are planned.

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 plates continues.

Archive Maintenance

· Made available to CalTech all the reprocessed GSH header files for the POSS-II survey.

·Performed a little reorganizing of the tape archive for better organization and more available space.

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

· Began processing of POSS-I E red plates in the GSC2 production pipeline. Major processing script changes were necessary for both algorithmic reasons and to improve data management and flow. It is believed this survey could be processed very rapidly into catalog files for COMPASS ingest.

COMPASS Database

· Production object-matching has completed 1269 plates. This task will continue to run over the next few weeks.

· ApplyCalibs database production task has been running on all the plates in COMPASS to update the photometric calibrations. The task was halted briefly to improve performance of the (more important and computationally intensive) plate matching routine. To date 664 plates have had the latest calibrations applied to the COMPASS database. The apply calibrations task has performed well with only one problem plate of the 664. The recalibrated data will be included in the next GSC-II release.

· A JAVA application, ShowSky, was developed with interfaces to multiple catalog and image archives. A query interface to COMPASS was written and successfully deployed. This visualization tool allows users to overplot the GSC-2 export catalog with the COMPASS catalog data with DSS images. An installation kit was completed. Final delivery to general users will require a Web license for Objectivity, which has been budgeted. Cost negotiation for this license is in progress.

· Objectivity was upgraded to version 5.2.1 to resolve kernel memory leaks. The transaction cleanup delay problem still persists.

· COMPASS administrative tasks for reclaiming empty page files was run on the entire Federated database (All-Sky). This maintenance task reclaimed ~ 50GB of fragmented space.

· A new Dell 6350 server was received and the configuration of this system has been initiated. COMPASS will be migrated to this system in the weeks ahead. We are waiting for the arrival of the remaining disk racks and resolution of hardware related issues to complete the assembly.

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Installed the Tycho 2 catalog into the VMS database. Will begin using this improved catalog for pipeline calibrations.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· Performed more classification experiments, fine tuned the training set marking tool, and made a "tinker” version of Classify that tells which final leaf node an object ends up in.

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

· Beatrice Bucciarelli will visit for a week in April to work on GSPC-II testing and publication.

· Reduced the remaining data to complete the 49 sq deg area observed with the KPNO CCD MOSAIC. Photographic error analysis is in progress using plates XJ850 and XP850.

· Correcting astrometric errors in GSPC-II sequences that cause problems in the GSC-II pipeline.

GSC-II General Software Development

· Defined and tested a build of pipeline software including Features, ApplyCalib, Photosol, Inventory, and Deblender tasks. Also tested related infrastructure software (the Catalog Stager and XSPAM).

· Ported the RCAT task to the CASB environment; modified the XSPAM catalog stager to work with the new TYCHO 2 catalog.

· Reviewed ongoing development work on QA tasks.

GSC-II Science

· Daniela Carollo will visit for 3 weeks in April to work on identifying high proper motion halo white dwarf stars.

· George Hawkins is visiting to continue his research on open clusters.

· Prepared and sent two DLTs to OATo containing 40 scans of XO plates.

· Also sent an MOD containing the most recent GSH and DID files.

· Using a better, faster tool for matching members of open clusters.

· Still studying proper motions of members of the NGC2264 cluster.

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		344	40	384	43		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		53	33	86	10		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	92	48	140	16		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	126	40	166	19		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/15m	451	266	95	362	80		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	66	39	105	12		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 = 969,703,754)

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I E	880	5	0	5	0		3
POSS-QV	613	0	0	0	0		3
POSS-II J	897	510	0	510	49		1
POSS-II F	897	743	0	743	81		1
POSS-II N	897	3	0	3	0		4
SERC-J	894	128	0	128	14		1
South-F	894	473	0	473	51		1
UKST-IR	894	0	0	0	0		4
South-SR	109	13	0	13	12		2
South-QV	94	57	0	57	14		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 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	578	0	578	99		1
POSS-II	295	144	0	144	49		1
SERC	894	873	0	873	98		1

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	578	0	578	99	P1	1
POSS-II	295	144	0	144	49		1
SERC	894	873	0	873	98		1

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