CASB Report March, 2001

Highlights for Division Meeting

· Completed loading all plates needed for GSC2.2 into the COMPASS Database.

· Completed matching objects in all northern regions and nearly all southern regions for GSC2.2.

· Delivered the Instrument Scientist's version of the Bright Object Tool.

Community Affairs and Communications

· Supported OPO in collaboration with the San Francisco Exploratorium in a project for a live web cast from STScI. Facilitated extensive filming in the plate vault of our archival plate collection as well as providing digital images and still footage for the web cast project.

· McLean attended SDSS consortium meeting at Fermilab.

· Morrison gave talks on GSC-II and possible science projects with this catalog at the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh and York College in New York.

· Morrison has begun writing a journal article describing the astrometry for the GSC-II.

· Laidler presented a poster paper on imprinting titled “Canaries in the Data Mine?” at the 2001 STScI Software workshop, 13 March 2001.

· Supported two tours.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Reviewed six Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period. Two GSPRs were fine lock failures and one of these was a misclassified compact group of three stars. The rest of the GSPRs were either coarse track or search failures. Two of these were misclassifications of an elliptical galaxy and a plate flaw. The remaining problems were due to the GSs having much fainter magnitudes than predicted. This pair came from GSC1 plate 0024 of field S028, which had a short GSPC-I sequence, perhaps resulting in a poor photometric calibration. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the six GSs.

· Supported investigation of a missed STIS acquisition of an offset star in the Orion region.

· Generated GSC2.2 data for STIS MAMA snapshot targets

· Delivered the Instrument Scientist's version of the Bright Object Tool, which currently supports STIS and WFPC2. Planning to support ACS and NICMOS and will be giving the Instrument Scientists of those teams, the tool for testing, within the next month. The next major release of the tool is slated for June 1st. In this release we plan on fixing some of the minor problems (or annoyances) that have been found with the tool.

NGST Development Studies

· Morrison is participating in the NGST proposal writing.

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Continued scanning POSS-I O plates.

· Received and unpacked a shipment of UKST-IR plates from ROE.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· GAMMA1 continues to perform nominally, but is in need of preventive maintenance.

· GAMMA2 performed well all last month but was taken out of production scanning 28-Mar-2001 due to a problem that is causing a feedback to the X-servo causing very unstable table motion.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Continued compressing scans of the POSSII-N and UKST-IR surveys.

Archive Maintenance

· Working on GETIMAGE failure with DSS-I first reported by NAOJ Astronomical Data Analysis Center.

· Rewrote a number of CD’s with data errors reported by NAOJ.

GSC-II

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

· Completed database plate loading of the southern plates necessary for GSC2.2, thus completing the all-sky loading.

· Fewer than ten southern plates remain unmatched. Some of these represent problems in matching similar to the database problems reported in February for the northern hemisphere plates.

· By reading the GSH files and DID files, have compiled a list of plates in COMPASS database that do not have adequate calibrations for GSC-II.

· Performed recalibration tasks on 168 plates during the month. Of these plates:

- 151 required database matching, including 63 that required database loading as well;

- 17 required only recalibration and running the NT apply calibrations task.

· Continuing to perform QA of the loaded and matched plates. This has revealed a small number of plates requiring additional recalibration. Also uncovered up to five plates that may require reloading.

· Continuing to perform as much database cleanup as possible prior to supporting the catalog export.

· Continued development of export code to support additional required parameters.

CALIBRATIONS: General

· Completed running CIQA on all plates loaded into the test database. Overlapping plate residuals in position and magnitude were studied for same color pairs. Outlier values for both astrometry and photometry are quite high in some cases; these however are not consistently identifiable as the “worst case” plates that we loaded into the test database. Analysis continues.

· (OATo) Produced statistics on the GSCII data contained in the DID and GSH files, checking 4407 GSCII plates. In the next month, hope to publish the results in the OATo web site and in an OATo Internal Report.

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

· Working on defining the magnitude dependent systematic errors in the GSC-II positions by making comparisons to the SPM, NMP and 2MASS catalogs.

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

· Continued work with training set extrema on the decision tree for visualization and process improvement in classification. Experiments indicate that this imprinting technique can be used to add a level of reliability to the output of the classification task. This work also confirms our understanding that voting multiple trees does improve results, and that our present training set is deficient in bright objects.

· Designed and implemented a FITS file format for the training set data for use with the OC1 tree building software. Developed a utility to convert existing training sets to FITS format. Modified OC1 so that the user can control the feature subset to be used by editing a table in the FITS training file.

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

· Bucciarelli observed several GSPC-II sequences during five nights under marginal weather conditions. Garcia is reducing the data, completing 20 more sequences. He has 1.5 nights left to complete.

GSC-II Science

· F. Guglielmetti continued the Proper Motions Studies of Stellar-mass Black-Hole Candidates (BHC) project in collaboration with R.Mignani (ESO), A. Spagna (OATo) and F. Mirabel (CEA-CE Saclay):

- The identification of a BHC at high galactic latitudes raises intriguing questions in the scientific debate on the formation of stellar-mass BHs and on their association to SN events.These questions can be easily addressed by computing the BHs recoil velocity through proper motion measurements of their companion stars.

- We considered the BHC, XTE J1118+48. Its proper motion measurement obtained both in the optical with the GSC and in the radio with the VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array) has been used to constrain the BH space velocity and its birthplace in the galactic halo.

· Submitted a first paper to Nature (Mirabel et al. 2001).

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		652	0	652	73		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		219	82	301	32		3
Rescans			33	1	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	514	27	541	60		3
AAO SES	606	606	0	606	100		1
PPARC ER	288	288	0	288	100		1
UKST-IR	894	503	67	570	64		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	670	110	780	87		4
AAO-SES	606	613	0	613	100		3
PPARC-ER	288	250	0	250	87		3
AAO-SR	109	73	0	73	67		4
UKST-IR	894	612	41	653	73		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	44	0	44	5		4
SERC-J/EJ	894	829	0	829	93		1
South-F	894	894	0	894	100		1
UKST-IR	894	2	0	2	0		4
South-SR	116	110	6	116	100		2
South-QV	94	94	0	94	100		2

GSC-II COMPASS DATABASE LOAD

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	683	25	708	79		1
South-F	894	727	15	742	83		1
UKST-IR	894	2	0	2	0		4
South-SR	116	111	5	116	100		2
South-QV	94	77	13	90	96		2

GSC-II Dataset for V2.1.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	559	2	561	96	P1	1
POSS-II	314	169	2	171	54		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	559	2	561	96	P1	1
POSS-II	314	169	2	171	54		1
SERC	894	868	16	884	99		1

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