CASB Report July, 2001

Highlights for Division Meeting

· Provided a copy of the full unpublished GSC 2.2.1 (998,402,801 objects) to the XMM X-ray Mission for use in testing and evaluation for possible integration into XMM Mission operations.

· Completed an updated version of the GSC 2.2.01 export catalog with a 4% increase in size

(455,851,237 entries) from the initial release. Obtained 100% all sky coverage in two bandpasses with this release and corrected some plate processing issues.

Community Affairs and Communications

· McLean attended the SPIE meeting on Astronomical Data Analysis where NVO issues were discussed.

· Laidler attended the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy III conference, and presented a poster on “Canaries in the Data Mine”, incorporating the latest results from the classification work with imprinting.

· Hosted several tours of the plate vault and scanning facility including tours for the annual STScI family day.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

· Laidler and McLean worked with SSG management to produce a transition plan for Laidler’s upcoming transfer to SSG that will permit her ongoing participation in the GSC2 project and classification research even after her transition is complete. We thank SSG management for their flexibility in this matter.

· Also working with SSG to retain Wolfe part-time to assist with COMPASS DB management after he transfers.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Reviewed two Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period. Both GSPRs were fine lock failures. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

· With Matt Lallo, continued investigating HOPRs 542 and 699, failures to find an Orion target.

· Rusty Whitman, while testing the Visual Target Tuner (VTT), correctly identified a GSC-I entry as the position of Barnard’s Star (10” annual proper motion) in 1982.5, the epoch of the associated plate. Filed a Bad GS Alert for this star to prevent possible GS selection.

· Work is continuing on the Bright Object Tool in the VTT with the next release scheduled in the December timeframe.

NGST Development Studies

·

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Returned the last shipment of UKST-IR plates to ROE. At the end of the month received a shipment of 100 plates of the SERC-IR Milky Atlas, c. 1980. This survey, plus the later SERC-IR survey, constitutes the southern plate material for the IR band of the GSC-II.

· Continued scanning POSSI-O plates between shipments from ROE.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· Gamma 1 continues to perform well.

· Checked several components of GAMMA2 but found no solutions to bring GAMMA2 back into production.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Continued compressing scans of the POSSII-N survey.

· Completed compressing scans of the AAO Short-Red survey.

· Started compressing scans of the POSSI-O survey.

Archive Maintenance

· Developing a plan for porting the GetImage software, used to get a DSS image given a set of coordinates, from VMS to NT. Starting to write up requirements and an implementation plan to complete the project.

· Worked on four archive help desk requests for help/information.

· Continued low-level rationalization of MOD archive.

GSC-II

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

· Completed a new version of the GSC2 Export catalog (GSC 2.2.01). This version contains about a 4% increase in the catalog size (455,851,237 total entries) as well as fixing many of the bugs contained in the first release. Obtained complete 100% all sky coverage in two bandpasses with this release. Plates still remain with potential matching problems, but all plates have now been loaded and run successfully through the matching routine. Simple statistics have been compiled over this export catalog showing improvement over the previous release.

· Completed a new version of the full (no magnitude selection) export catalog. This version, GSC 2.2.1, is not yet publicly available. The new uncut version contains nearly one billion entries; full statistics have yet to be compiled.

· Provided a tape copy of the full GSC2.2.1 to the XMM X-ray Mission for use in testing and evaluation for possible integration into XMM Mission operations.

· Using object density maps kindly provided by OATo, investigated catalog problem areas that escaped a simple statistical analysis. A few problems have emerged which affect a small percentage of the data. A sample of the problems shows areas where matching was performed twice (resulting in two entries for one object) and areas where photometric and/or astrometric calibrations may not match surrounding plates correctly.

· Developed some simple visualization tools to help in the evaluation of areas on the sky where possible calibration problems exist. These will show up unambiguously along the plate boundaries.

· Continued to receive a considerable number of data requests through our web page query.

· Continued to investigate user inquiries regarding the GSC2 data set. Several small problems affecting export fields for several plates have been corrected as a result of user inquires.

· Continued to maintain a web page containing known bugs and limitations of the GSC2.2, and announced the release of the “patch version” GSC2.2.01 on the web page.

· Continued processing POSSII-N and UKST-IR plates.

CALIBRATIONS: General

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Working on understanding the systematic errors in GSC 2 positions, which are a function of magnitude and distance from the center of the plate. Using the SPM to quantify the effect.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· Continued modifications to VERCLASS, the versatile classification task presently in development. Significant milestones this month include the ability to read and manage several families of decision trees with noncongruent sets of features and classes; to apply them to each object selectively or in combination based on their application criteria; and to report the final statistics to the DID file. This completes the removal of the previously hardcoded restrictions on features, classes, and trees. VERCLASS can now be used to classify a plate using separate decision trees for bright and faint objects (with some tunable overlap), resulting in output classes of [star, galaxy, blend] for bright objects, and [star, nonstar, defect] for faint objects.

· Additional software activities with VERCLASS include implementing the use of the imprinting technique to disqualify votes from less reliable decision trees in determining the final classification. Experiments comparing the results of disqualified voting from all-tree voting indicate that the change in voting procedure changes the final classification in ~1-3% of the objects; that the results can change even if only one of the five trees is disqualified; and that the changed classifications are correct in 60-75% of the examined cases. This is extremely promising.

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

· From the first two La Palma runs in 2001, obtained 42 POSS-II, 16 POSS-I, and one SERC sequences for GSPC-II under photometric conditions.

GSC-II Science

Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary

SCANNING

Survey		Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897		902	0	902	100	S4	1
POSS-II F	897		910	0	910	100	S4	1
POSS-II N	897		880	0	880	98	S4	1
AAO-SES	606		614	0	614	100	S4	1
PPARC-ER	288		288	0	288	100		1
AAO-SR	118		118	0	118	100	S2	-
UKST-SR	112		50	0	50	45	S5	3
UKST-IR	894		697	0	697	78	S6	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		319	35	354	38		3
Rescans			34	0	34

• 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.
• 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.
• S6. Includes UKST-IR plates from the SERC I/SR Atlas of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds (1978-1985) and the I-Survey of the Southern Sky (1990-xx).

COMPRESSION

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-II J	897	895	0	897	100		2
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II N	897	645	36	681	76		3
AAO SES	606	606	0	606	100		1
PPARC ER	288	288	0	288	100		1
AAO-SR	118	118	0	118	100		3
UKST-IR	894	674	23	697	78		3
POSS-I O	936	0	20	20	2		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	900	0	900	100		3
POSS-II N	897	823	10	833	93		4
AAO-SES	606	613	0	613	100		3
PPARC-ER	288	288	0	288	100		3
AAO-SR	109	116	0	116	100		4
UKST-IR	894	658	39	697	78		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-I O	936	0	20	20	2		5
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	931	0	931	99		3
POSS-QV	613	2	0	2	0		3
POSS-II J	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II N	897	151	36	187	21		4
SERC-J/EJ	894	829	0	829	93		1
South-F	894	894	0	894	100		1
UKST-IR	894	109	55	164	18		4
South-SR	116	116	0	116	100		2
South-QV	94	94	0	94	100		2

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD (no.objects = 998,402,801)

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I E	936	23	0	23	2		3
POSS-QV	613	2	0	2	0		3
POSS-II J	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II F	897	899	0	899	100		1
POSS-II N	897	27	0	27	3		4
SERC-J	894	709	0	709	79		1
South-F	894	742	0	742	83		1
UKST-IR	894	2	0	2	0		4
South-SR	116	116	0	116	100		2
South-QV	94	90	0	90	96		2

GSC-II Dataset for V2.2.n delivery (1791 Fields, 3438 plates) (P1)

Item	Count	% done	Notes
Plates available	3438	100
Plates processed	3438	100
DB Load	3438	100

• 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	561	10	571	98	P1	1
POSS-II	314	171	42	213	68		1
SERC	894	868	16	884	99		1

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	563	8	571	98	P1	1
POSS-II	314	175	0	175	56		1
SERC	894	884	17	901	100		1

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