CASB Report January, 2002

Highlights for Division Meeting

· Completed compressing the selected scans of all POSSII-N plates received from Palomar.

· Received a special shipment of the last two available POSSII-N plates from Palomar.

Community Affairs and Communications

· Several CASB members attended the 199^th AAS Meeting in Washington, January 6-10.

· R. White and V. Laidler displayed a poster at the January AAS Meeting: "GSC2.2 vs SDSS Astrometry, Photometry, and Classification."

· D. Carollo, S. T. Hodgkin, A. Spagna, R. L. Smart, M. G. Lattanzi, and B. McLean also displayed a poster at the meeting: “Discovery of a Dwarf Carbon Star toward the NGP.” They have submitted a paper on this research to A&A.

· A. Rosenberg and A. Storrs (Towson University) displayed a poster at the meeting: “Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta.”

· Laidler prepared and presented a talk at the AURA Software Workshop: "OCtoo: A Classification Software Package".

· Greene prepared and presented a talk at the AURA Software Workshop: "Database Technologies for Astronomical Archives".

· Prepared contributions for the GSC2 multimedia CD project.

· Updated the GSC2 Calibrations/Comparisons page to include the new SDSS comparison results.

Project Management and Technical Infrastructure

· Daniela Carollo of OATo has visited STScI for 20 days to support selection of additional high proper motion objects from the original plate scans and GSC2 processing files to support the search for halo white dwarf candidates.

· Antonio Volpicelli started comparison of Objectivity and MS SQLserver for GALEX/GSC-II

· McLean and Greene continued supporting SDSS planning activities.

MISSION SUPPORT

HST Operations

· Reviewed 9 new Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period. Seven of these were fine lock failures. One of the other GSPRs documented loss of lock during re-acquisitions due to the faintness of the star, possibly a nearby star too faint to be in GSC1. The remaining GS also was too faint and failed to maintain coarse track. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.

· Continuing the port of GetImage to the Windows NT server. Recently met with David Wolfe to work out some more bugs in the porting process. These bugs have prevented one from reading data from a CD, a test to verify whether the port is working. Continuing to correct bugs and hoping to be on schedule for the completion of the data transfer to the raidarray.

· Continued to obtain statistics of webserver visits, specifically, accessing of GSC2.

· Occasionally answering questions from the APT team about the Bright Object Tool.

· Collecting responses about the draft HUGS2 report

NGST Development Studies

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

Plate Scanning

· Scanning UKST-IR plates from the current ROE shipment.

· Returned 44 of the plates from this shipment to ROE, including several high-priority plates that they had requested.

· Received a special shipment of the last two available POSSII-N plates from Palomar. Of the two fields covered by these plates, one would have been difficult and the other impossible to observe with the UK Schmidt.

GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems

· After the power outage of 29 December, some of the devices on pixel1 did not come back on line. These included two directories containing two completed scans not yet archived. Thomas Walker was able to restart the disks, saving the scans. Loomis then was able to restart the scanning program and production scanning resumed 11 January.

· GAMMA2 is still down; performed no production scans on GAMMA2 throughout he period.

· The low number of production scans this month is due mostly to the above problems.

Data Compression/CD Production

· Completed compressing the selected scans of all POSS-II-N plates received from Palomar (except for the two plates just received).

Archive Maintenance

· Completed migration of all red and blue XDSS CDROMs to the RaidTec NFS raidarray.

· A total of 766 CDROMs with 475GB of compressed files has been transferred.

· Started migration of the IR XDSS CDROMs.

· Loaded the third set of CDROMs (~300) in the carriages in preparation to continue copying.

· Worked on one archive help desk request for help/information.

· Continued low-level rationalization of MOD archive.

GSC-II

Plate Processing and COMPASS Database

· Continued processing POSS Quick V plates.

· Restarted processing of the POSS-II-N survey.

CALIBRATIONS: General

CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry

CALIBRATIONS: Classification

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

GSC-II Science

· (OATo) Halo White Dwarf Project. Daniela Carollo is working on the selection and processing of ~ 15 regions toward the NGP in order to cover an area of 400 deg². The high proper motion objects selected from these fields will increase the sample of halo WD candidates. The spectroscopy follow-up of this sample will be in April at La Palma (Canary Islands). At the moment selections are complete for 13 regions, with the help of Charlie Loomis, and two more regions could be chosen in the next weeks.

· OATo and CASB staff also report the discovery of a new dwarf carbon star (GSC2U J131147.2+292348) that has been serendipitously identified during the proper motion survey for cool white dwarfs. Its large proper motion (0.48 as/yr) and its faint apparent magnitude (V~ 18.7) suggest a nearby object of low luminosity. In addition, a low resolution spectrum taken with the William Herschel Telescope clearly shows the strong C2 bands and confirm the dwarf nature of the carbon star. They derive the absolute magnitude limit of M_V >13.5 from its kinematic properties; it appears significantly fainter than the other dC stars for which accurate luminosities have been determined using trigonometric parallaxes (Harris et al. 1998). Finally, the spectrum shows an unexpectedly strong emission below 4700 A This could be an indication of the presence of a bluer secondary component.

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		831	17	848	95	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		418	0	418	45		3
Rescans			35	0	35

• 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	832	28	860	96		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	714	53	767	86		3
POSS-I O	936	101	0	101	11		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	857	14	871	97		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	733	9	742	82		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	120	0	120	13		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	611	55	57	112	18		3
POSS-II J	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II F	897	897	0	897	100		1
POSS-II N	897	350	0	350	39		4
SERC-J/EJ	894	829	0	829	93		1
South-F	894	894	0	894	100		1
UKST-IR	894	399	1	400	45		4
South-SR	116	116	0	116	100		2
South-QV	94	94	0	94	100		2
POSS-I O	936	17	0	17	2		5

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

GSPC-II OBSERVATIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	603	0	603	100	P1	1
POSS-II	314	271	0	271	86		1
SERC	894	889	0	889	99		1

GSPC-II REDUCTIONS

Survey	Goal	Previous Month	Current Month	Current Total	% done	Notes	Priority
POSS-I	584	603	1	601	100	P1	1
POSS-II	314	271	7	278	88		1
SERC	894	905	40	945	100		1

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