CASB Report June, 2001

Highlights for Division Meeting

· Public release of GSC 2.2 announced at the AAS meeting along with supporting press release.

Community Affairs and Communications

· McLean and Asbury attended the AAS meeting in support of the GSC 2.2 public release, the Sloan EDR and the APT.

· Laidler attended the 2001 annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America, and presented a talk on “Canaries in the Data Mine”, based on the classification work with imprinting.

· Copies of GSC 2.2.0 sent to GEMINI (North and South), ESO, CDS and CADC in addition to OATo.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Reviewed four Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period. Three GSPRs were fine lock failures. The other one was a search failure due to a compact group of objects that was misclassified in GSC-I. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

· The GSPRs this month brought the total number to 500. Of these, 353 or over 70 percent, were fine lock failures usually with poor S curves due to close binaries. Some 117 GSPRs were search failures or faint objects, often due to classification errors. The rest are miscellaneous failures including high proper motions, spoilers, bad GSC photometry, and inconsistent acquisitions. Note, that HST typically uses over 3,000 unique GSs from GSC-I every year.

· In mid-June, released a version of the Visual Target Tuner (VTT) with the Bright Object Tool, for use by PI's. This version uses the latest version of the GSC 2.2 with both an F and a J magnitude, with no magnitude selection, and with Tycho 2 entries for bright objects.

NGST Development Studies

·

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Completed scanning the current shipment of UKST-IR plates on GAMMA1. Tests are underway to insure the integrity of the current scans prior to return of the shipment to ROE.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· Intermittent problems of unknown origin continue to plague GAMMA2. Testing of electronic components continues. So far the primary suspected component(s) have been the HP Laser position transducer and the counters (fifo, ppg), but the complicated interdependent nature of the electronic components has made isolating the intermittent failures difficult. No production scans are currently being performed on GAMMA2.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Continued compressing scans of the POSSII-N survey.

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

Archive Maintenance

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

· Continued low-level rationalization of MOD archive.

GSC-II

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

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

· Continued to assess and fix problem areas in GSC 2.2. Successfully re-loaded and matched several more of the very crowded southern regions as well as many individual database regions that showed unusual statistical properties. Continued to focus on the beta version of the full (no magnitude selection) of GSC 2.2 (GSC2.2.1).

· Counts were generated for GSC 2.2.1 showing 938,862,694 unique objects with 596,621,454 red and blue matches as well as 65,494,534 red and visual matches coming from the short exposure plates from the galactic plane surveys. The matching ratios for each database region for the uncut catalog show excellent results for the matching and are very strongly peaked at the 60 % to 70 % range. This has aided in the quick detection of gross problem areas in the catalog.

· Began a new complete export of both GSC 2.2 and GSC 2.2.1 in order to pick up all the fixes and to replace data from the reported and known bugs.

· Continued to maintain a web page containing known bugs and limitations of the GSC2.2.

CALIBRATIONS: General

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Continued a study on a magnitude dependent systematic error in the GSC 2.2 positions. This study compares the position in the GSC 2.2 (GSC 2.1) with those in the SPM, NPM, USNO A and 2MASS catalogs.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· Continued modifications to VERCLASS, the versatile classification task presently in development. Significant activities this month include:

- the use of the imprinting technique to assign an indication of extrapolation to the

- classification;

- the ability to read the set of classification features to be used from a table in the decision tree FITS file;

- the ability to selectively classify only those objects which satisfy criteria associated with the decision tree, as stored in FITS keywords.

· Experiments using the imprinting technique clearly indicate that deblended “child” objects do not occupy the same parts of parameter space as single objects. This confirms previous suspicions that separate training sets and decision trees are needed for more reliable classification of “child” objects.

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

· The third JKT/La Palma run (10 nights, ending July 3) of semester 01A is in progress. G. Massone, the observer, has reported successful nights up to now.

· Allocated 7 nights CTIO time in December 2001

GSC-II Science

· McLean had observing run at APO 3.5m to observe high proper motion halo white dwarf candidates found from GSC2 data.

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		674	16	690	77		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		301	6	307	33		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. 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	895	0	897	100		2
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II N	897	617	28	645	72		3
AAO SES	606	606	0	606	100		1
PPARC ER	288	288	0	288	100		1
AAO-SR	118	90	28	118	100		3
UKST-IR	894	658	16	674	75		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	0	823	92		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	0	658	74		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	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	131	0	131	15		4
SERC-J/EJ	894	829	0	829	93		1
South-F	894	894	0	894	100		1
UKST-IR	894	72	0	72	8		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.