18th May 2004 Obs meeting room 10.00 - 12:50 Present: JRL, PSB, MJI, DWE, WJS, STH, RGM Agenda ------ 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. JAC telecons of 22nd April and 5th May 4. VDMT meeting of 4th May 5. VDUC meeting 6. UKIDSS MSB design meeting & ESO public surveys 7. ESO PDR 8. Work package accounting 9. AOB Minutes ------- 1. Actions from last meeting STH has made no progress regarding the spatial systematics in the UFTI standards data and new test data. It was felt that this really should be finished off and bumped higher up STH's priority list. Ongoing. <<<< MJI some progress (calibration) on comparison of FIRES project reduced data with ours - but still ongoing <<<< STH calibration of FIRES data has been carried out by MJI using 2MASS data. It was estimated that this was done to ~5% accuracy. STH Missing ISAAC files have been given to JRL. JRL have decided that the report on ISAAC reductions will be incorporated MJI within the SPIE presentation. PSB has emailed Nigel Hambly regarding the service level agreement that exists up in Edinburgh. His response was that there wasn't one and that they were "just trying to maximise uptime where we can at reasonable cost." MJI has updated the milestones web page. RGM asked whether the old milestones web pages were archived since they could be useful for tracing work history. MJI said the old versions hadn't been kept since this was essentially a tick list, but noted that the detail of progress was already recorded in the monthly reports and gantt charts. MJI has drawn up an email notification list which is available from him and DWE for aspiring authors of reports. MJI over the next 2 days MJI will make a start on the SPIE presentation JRL paper and rope in JRL and STH to help draft relevant sections. STH The deadline is 25th May - ongoing, until then. <<<< PSB wrote a shell document for the PDR RIXs and circulated it. STH altered the Q2 2004 task list to account for PSB's comments MJI JRL has done further checks on the new WFCAM test data. He reported that he has got some plausible results for a restricted range of linearity measurements. However, he warned that this may not be representative of what we will get with the end setup since the readout mode, illumination etc. will be different. MJI received more news on WFCAM status via the JAC telecons (see item 3). JRL DWE wrote a document explaining CASU's document numbering system. There was some discussion on the merits and pitfalls of unique numbers (VPO) -v- unique numbers+letters (CASU's). There is a potential for confusion if CASU deposit their (mainly) internal documents in the VISTA sharepoint repository. Since they are not intending to do this it was felt that this could be handled on a one-by-one basis eg. DID doc. 2. Comments on WFAU minutes There were no comments worth recording. 3. JAC telecons of 22nd April and 5th May JRL reported on the 2 telecons that have been held since the last CASU meeting. The news on the detector front is that the ATC have finished their metrology tests and didn't find anything wrong with their procedures. The 'A' team is meeting (met) with Rockwell at the end of April. Futher cold tests have been suspended until the results of the meeting have been agreed. The pre-shipping acceptance tests can be carried out on the engineering array. JAC representatives will visit the ATC in June for this. The slight hiatus in the schedule means a delay of ~3 weeks with shipping of WFCAM now pencilled in ~1 month later. Meanwhile UKIRT have issued a call for further non-WFCAM proposals for July and August to fill the gap in the schedule. This implies engineering commissioning on the telescope at the summit cannot now begin until September. On-sky characterisation and the first science data are expected 1-2 months later. In parallel with this, delivery of the corrector plate is slightly behind schedule. However, this now seems close to the required tolerance specs and may not impact on the acceptance, or WFCAM delivery, plans. CASU have received a test SDF file from the ATC via JAC and have sent some comments back to the ATC via JAC. MJI and JRL inquired how the calibration measurements for the non-linearity correction were going to be made. It is not possible to simultaneously get both the reset frames and the reset-corrected frames. Therefore the plan is to fix the illumination level, use RR mode, do a reset-read and get a 'bias' level reset frame and then reset-read with successively longer exposures to get the required observations. Some issues with this scheme were raised: it is a different readout mode; if a reset is done globally and a read is done by rows, then the exposure time depends on position! This latter needs clarifying. PH suspects lookup tables are required for the DAS, rather than polynomial coeffs. He will check with AV about this and also about the reset issue. MJI and JRL also inquired about responsiblity for providing the focus estimation code. This appears to be an ATC reponsibility. The LTO transfer test went smoothly as soon as the LTO reappeared on PH's desk and took 5 days from inception to reception in Cambridge. The JAC-CASU milestones were reviewed, and subsequently updated on the web page. MJI asked AA to check that the UKIRT board were aware of CASU and WFAU's offer to provide short talks followed by Q and A session at the next UKIRT board meeting (see below) The next JAC telecon will be on 28th May at 9pm - MJI's turn to provide the wine. 4. VDMT meeting of 4th May STH reported that the last VDMT meeting went smoothly. There was a request regarding the monitoring of our progress and that we use earned value. The detailed discussion of this point was left until item 8. Final preparation arrangements for the ESO PDR were discussed. The answers to the RIXs were progressing well, with no serious issues raised so far. It was confirmed at the VDMT meeting that CASU and WFAU will give short presentations at the next UKIRT board meeting to be held in Durham on the 24th/25th May. The next VDMT meeting is on 7th June so monthly reports to STH by Friday 28th May please. <<<< 5. VDUC meeting MJI reported on the VDUC meeting held on 7th May in Cambridge. Apart from a few minor issues the meeting was very constructive and established a precedure for reviewing the requirements on the pipeline and archive for WFCAM and for setting up the same for the UK side of the VDFS. Simon Dye (SD, Cardiff), the new Consortium Science Verifier introduced himself and described what he sees as his role. He will be working closely with CASU assessing the science quality of the pipeline output. In lieu of WFCAM data MJI and STH undertook to provide SD with access to the FIRES test commissioning data. <<<< For more details see the provisional minutes, actions from the meeting and TOR which are on our internal/ web page directory. 6. UKIDSS MSB design meeting & ESO public surveys STH reported on this meeting held at Oxford on May 10th. The meeting started with an update on WFCAM status. The role of complementary optical surveys on the VST was discussed. The OmegaCam team are thought to be planning to survey large areas of sky covered by UKIDSS surveys. This presents an interesting conundrum since their data is private, while those of UKIDSS are public, putting the Dutch group at a significant advantage. The ESO call for public surveys (deadline October 2004) on the VST requires that interested parties guarantee to process and make available to the community the survey data. In light of this SJW had already asked at the VDUC meeting if CASU were interested in being involved in processing VST data. MJI said they were interested, but that this would require more manpower effort and hardware than is currently available and would therefore require bidding for further funding to do this. The opinion regarding pipeline acceptance testing was to supply SD with the FIRES data. STH and MJI will organize this. SJW also wanted intermediate data products to be supplied as well. Since this is almost unlimited in scope given: the number of processing steps; not all the intermeidate data products are kept; and that the raw data amounts to 30 Gbytes already, it was felt better to limit the intermediate products to the individual OB outputs. The UFTI data could be supplied later but this would probably need to be re-reduced since most of the products have long since vanished. On-sky characterization was discussed at the meeting. It was pointed out that JAC already have a web page relating to this. RGM suggested that there should be a direct link from the WFCAM pages to this. He also mentioned that Paul Hirst's home page should also be linked directly. DWE and STH will look into this. <<<< Since CASU needs to work closely to Simon Dye it was thought that it might be a good idea for him to come out to Hawaii for the second half of the on-sky commissioning. The Survey Definition Tool (SDT) written by Martin Folger was given a demonstration at Oxford. This generates the MSBs that are needed to be fed into the Observing Tool (OT). CASU needs MSBs (or pseudocode) from the UKIDSS survey heads in order to comment on them. It was agreed that these would be supplied by the end of May. SJW said that no survey scheduling simulator had been written and didn't look like it would be. Related to this, Andy Adamson has just released a document on an operational model for WFCAM surveys and has requested comments. All to read this document and supply comments to MJI for forwarding. <<<< STH said that the version of the Oxford minutes he had was a draft and that he needed to comment on them. There had already been a lot of discussion on these minutes, for the incurably curious they are also in our internal/ web page directory. <<<< 7. ESO PDR MJI said that the ESO PDR for the VDFS deliverables (13 May, Garching) went very well and the feedback was very positive. The agreed actions via the completed RIXs will be passed to CASU after they have been filtered through Jim Emerson and Michelle Peron. One of these actions will be to agree on a list of requirements for CPL/QFITS. JRL said that various header and data I/O issues exist in the current implementation of QFITS and that he and PSB would produce a more comprehensive list of requirements. <<<< At the PDR, the Data Interface Document (DID) was agreed to be a version 0.5 deliverable for FDR. This is important since a lot of assumptions regarding driving the pipeline are encoded in the FITS headers, which are the major part of this document. One aspect of this is that PSB needs an updated telescope FITS header description from JMS by the end of July if we want to iterate the DID one more time before FDR. The FDR for the ESO VDFS deliverables is scheduled to be mid-December, thus all the FDR documentation must completed by mid-November. JRL and PSB would like to officially quash the rumour that they had too many beers after the PDR and would like to know the source of this malicious gossip ...... hic! 8. Work package accounting STH said that there was a request from the VDMT to change the way that we monitor progress with the work packages. JMS would like CASU to use an earned value metric. The granularity we have agreed to use will be at the level of the work package units. This accounting needs to be done every quarter. The unit of each datum will still be FTE. As a test, using this method of earned value accounting for the previous year has shown that we are only 10% behind the schedule drawn up 18 months ago. 9. AOB MJI reported that various people have visited the APM building to check up on things that need doing for the alterations (roof and electrical). The planning notice has gone up (dated 23 April) and we had 2 weeks to object. Paul Aslin is organizing another meeting for next week with the architects and Estate Management. The schedule is still targetting a December finish. STH said that there would be a DAC meeting an 28 May. MJI and STH thought it would be useful to know how much grant-line money CASU has brought into the IoA and University since CASU's inception in 1998. MJI said that he would ask Paul Aslin for these figures and pass them on to STH. <<<< PSB raised the issue of upgrading the facilities in the Observatories Meeting Room. The items needed would be laptop projector, wireless networking, ventilation/air conditioning and a bigger/different table(s). This request should be passed on to the DAC. STH said that this would need approximate costing before the meeting to circumvent obfuscation. <<<< Continuing Actions ------------------ STH finish looking at the spatial systematics in the UFTI standards data and new test data. This needs to be bumped up the STH priority list! MJI compare FIRES project reduced data with ours MJI write paper for SPIE Glasgow (deadline 24th May) JRL STH New Actions ----------- ALL send monthly reports to STH by Friday 28th May STH to organize sending the FIRES data to Simon Dye (as soon as possible). MJI DWE add links to JAC on-sky characterization web page. Also Paul Hirst's STH home page and anything else that might be directly relevant ALL look at Andy Adamson's WFCAM Survey Operations web page and provide comments to MJI for forwarding STH send in comments on Oxford meeting minutes JRL draw up a more detailed list of the functionality required in PSB CPL/QFITS MJI provide figures from Paul Aslin on the CASU grant-line since 1998 STH provide costings for upgrade of Observatories Meeting Room facilities PSB and present at DAC.