CASB Report June
2002
Highlights for Division Meeting
·
none
Community Affairs and Communications
· The beta version of the multimedia tour is currently available at ftp.to.astro.it, astrometry/smart/gsc2m.zip. Once final testing has been done it is planned to produce 5000 copies and distribute them to all major astronomical institutions, planetaria, etc.
· Vicki Laidler gave a talk entitled "Stars, Galaxies, and the Ballot Box" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America in Madison, Wisconsin, in June.
· GSC-II Web services were halted several times by problems due to a user submitting an outdated query. Solved the problem by removing the outdated software.
·
Identified and fixed
several broken links on the CASB web pages.
Project Management and Technical Infrastructure
·
Beatrice Bucciarelli and Mario Lattanzi (OATo) are
visiting STScI for four weeks, writing a paper describing GSCII.
·
Volpicelli, Loomis, Greene and McLean attended a MS
SQLserver 2000 training class
MISSION SUPPORT
HST Operations
· Reviewed 5 new Guide Star Problem Reports (GSPRs) this period. Four of these were fine lock failures. The GS in the other problem was much fainter than expected probably because the image of the GS on the GSC1 plate is in the extended glow of the bright star, Arcturus, leading to an erroneous estimate of the plate background. Filed a Bad GS Alert for each of the GSs.
· Occasionally answering questions from the APT team about the Bright Object Tool.
NGST Development Studies
DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY
Plate Scanning
· Continued scanning the POSS-I O survey plates on GAMMA1.
· Packed and returned the remaining UKST-IR and –SR plates to ROE in anticipation of receiving another shipment of the remaining POSSI-IR and UKST-IR plates necessary to complete the surveys.
GAMMA Microdensitometer Systems
· Completed mechanical work on GAMMA2 to begin troubleshooting the scanner. This was done to ensure that the problem was not mechanical in nature. (The closed loop nature of the scanning hardware makes it difficult to identify differences between mechanical and electronic failures).
· After several days of testing various components, identified one problem. Unfortunately this is a very complicated component (designed that way to keep the machine from entering an auto mode in an undesirable way). Examining the schematics to identify possible failure points. It is hoped that this component could be the root cause of many of the problems encountered when attempting production scans over the past several months.
· GAMMA1 continues to perform nominal production scans.
Data Compression/CD Production
·
Continued
CDROM copying as they are produced to the CASBRAIDTEC.
· Continued compressing scans of the POSS-I O plates.
GSC-II
Plate Processing and COMPASS Database
· Continued to load and match both the northern and southern IR survey data.
· Continued to perform pipeline processing for the small number of remaining IR fields. Many of the remaining fields contain unique processing problems.
· Focused some attention on tracking methods to insure completeness of the IVN loading and matching as well as insuring all fields have the most current calibrations.
SOFTWARE
·
Continued the
backup of CASB software currently on the Chart server to the Compass server and
the re-organization of the development code.
·
Continued
development of a program that will access the current GSC2 database and obtain
information needed to create MCO files.
The MCO files will then be FTPed to a VMS system for reprocessing by
existing GSC2 software.
·
Have
re-written the GetSourceByID task that took a GSC2 ID, accessed the COMPASS
production database, and returned the object properties. The new application,
GetSouceBy-ID2, will now accept either a single GSC2 ID or an input list from
the command line. If a list of IDs is
specified, the output can be written to a log file named GETSOURCEBYID2_XXXX
where XXXX uniquely identifies the output file. Also modified the program to wait up to 600 seconds to receive a
lock from the lock server for accessing the database. In the past, if a lock were not available the application would
fail immediately.
·
Wrote a
document detailing the steps necessary to properly configure Microsoft Visual
C++ with an Objectivity/DB project.
CALIBRATIONS: Astrometry
CALIBRATIONS: Classification
· Laidler used the GetSourceByID database access tool to retrieve observations for 3500 objects classified by the SDSS as nonstars, and the GSC2.2 as non-unanimous stars. She used this data to investigate alternative voting strategies that would improve results for non-unanimous classifications. Surprisingly, the IR plates appear to be the most accurate predictors of classification for this sample of objects. However, a similar sample of SDSS stars, classified by the GSC2.2 as non-unanimous nonstars, must be analyzed in order to rule out the possibility that the IR plates simply have a bias towards nonstar classifications.
· She presented this work, along with some earlier results on the effectiveness of unanimity as a reliability indicator, in a talk entitled "Stars, Galaxies, and the Ballot Box" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America in Madison, Wisconsin, which was well received. She had useful discussions with other CSNA attendees concerning the Bayesian formulation of the classification procedure that will be used in the GSC2 classification paper, and she attended a short course on a combinatorial introduction to cluster analysis.
CALIBRATIONS: Photometry (GSPC-II and DSS-I and -II)
· The latest version of the production GS Photometric Catalog-II -- including matched and non-matched objects -- is now available for GSC-II pipeline processing. This version contains ALL available observations to date; more data are expected to come in after the Jul 21-23 CTIO run (which will be covered by E. Costa), and, hopefully, in late fall, pending the ING/JKT proposal selection outcome. Out of 1794 total nominal target fields, the current catalog contains 1627 fields with more than 10 stars per sequence, and 29 fields with 6 to 9 stars per sequence.
GSC-II Science
·
(OATo) Delivered final data to the CRA
project of C.Cacciari (Bologna Obs., Italy) and T. Kinman (NOAO). Produced
proper motions based on GSC2 material for a sample of RR Lyrae stars and BHB
giants within about 200 sq-deg (6 fields) towards the NGP to study the rotation
of the galactic halo up to 10 kpc from the plane. Preliminary results will be
presented at the Jenam2002 meeting in Porto.
·
Halo WD Project: Completed the calibration of
the spectra observed during the last run at TNG in April. Found 21 new white
dwarfs, 11 of them without H-alpha lines (mainly Helium WDs or ancient and very
cool Hydrogen WDs). These results have been presented by D.Carollo at the NATO
Advanced research workshop on White Dwarfs in Naples. The proposal for
spectroscopic observations and NIR photometry at TNG (Canarias) during the
second semester 2002 (AOT6) has been accepted.
Appendix – CASB Statistical Summary
PLATE PROCESSING STATUS
|
Survey |
μ |
Prefix |
Total |
SCANS Month/Total |
COMPRESS Month/Total |
PROCESS
Month/Total |
DBLOAD
Month/Total
|
DBMATCH
Month/Total
|
Notes
|
|
POSS-II J |
15 |
XJ |
897 |
0/902 |
0/897 |
0/902 |
0/897 |
0/897 |
S4 |
|
POSS-II F |
15 |
XP |
897 |
0/910 |
0/897 |
0/900 |
0/899 |
0/899 |
S4 |
|
POSS-II N |
15 |
XI |
897 |
0/882 |
4/872 |
1/872 |
0/784 |
285/377 |
S4 |
|
AAO-SES |
15 |
XS |
606 |
0/614 |
0/606 |
0/613 |
0/527 |
0/527 |
S4 |
|
PPARC-ER |
15 |
ER |
288 |
0/288 |
0/288 |
0/288 |
0/213 |
0/213 |
|
|
AAO-SR |
15 |
GR |
118 |
0/118 |
0/118 |
0/116 |
0/116 |
0/116 |
S2 |
|
UKST-SR |
15 |
RS |
112 |
0/50 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
S5 |
|
UKST-IR |
15 |
IS |
894 |
0/862 |
0/862 |
0/862 |
95/772 |
72/760 |
S6 |
|
SERC-J/EJ |
25 |
S |
894 |
0/894 |
0/894 |
0/365 |
0/365 |
0/365 |
S1 |
|
SERC-J/EJ rescans |
15 |
S |
447 |
0/443 |
0/99 |
0/344 |
0/344 |
0/344 |
S1 |
|
SERC-QV |
15 |
XV |
94 |
0/94 |
0/94 |
0/94 |
0/90 |
0/90 |
|
|
POSS-I E |
25 |
XE |
936 |
0/818 |
completed |
0/845 |
0/127 |
0/0 |
S3 |
|
POSS-I E |
15 |
XE |
936 |
0/129 |
0/0 |
0//108 |
0/28 |
0/0 |
S3 |
|
POSS-I O |
15 |
XO |
936 |
32/510 |
15/143 |
0/5 |
0/3 |
0/0 |
|
|
POSS-QV |
25 |
N |
611 |
0/611 |
0/611 |
0/254 |
0/2 |
0/0 |
|
|
Special |
25 |
XX |
4 |
0/4 |
0/4 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
|
|
Black Birch |
25 |
XB |
69 |
0/59 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
|
|
GPO Astrgph |
25 |
XG |
49 |
0/49 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
|
- 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).
GSC-II
RETRIEVALS for last 7 months
Dec 2001: 169721 
Jan 2002: 444834 
Feb 2002: 290727 
Mar 2002: 126745
Apr 2002: 53387
May 2002: 62853
Jun 2002: 50696