9th October 2006 Hoyle Committee Room 13:30 - 14:50 Present: DWE, MJI, JRL, PSB, STH, EGS, RGM, WJS, MR Agenda ------ 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. Brief WFCAM update 4. Report from VISTA meeting 5. UK VDFS review 6. GAIA 7. AOB Minutes ------- 1. Actions from last meeting JRL has not implemented the fix to the problem with the UKIRT archive (missing header information problem) - ongoing <<<< STH has FTP'd the data for the supernova remnant image from Albert Zijlstra, but this has to be combined to make a nice colour image and from that a poster - ongoing <<<< STH has not investigated the effects of stacking on the 2MASS/WFCAM non-linearity comparison - ongoing <<<< JRL has contacted AAT regarding the PostgreSQL problems so that he can repair the AAT archive. Progress is being made - ongoing <<<< EGS has made the new ING archive interface the default one. He showed the latest statistics: over the last 2 weeks there have been 15 users, 10 of whom have made 37 requests in total. All of this has been without human intervention. MJI have not emailed the new WFCAM colour equations to DWE and JRL. STH MJI has finished the investigations but some decisions on zero-point offsets for the y- and z-bands need to be made by the Calibration working group in order to produce the final numbers - ongoing <<<< MJI noteded out that he would like this sorted out by the start of 06B data processing (ie. ~four weeks time). STH said he would sort this out asap. <<<< PSB have discussed a proposal for RECIPE keywords, and talked to SMB JRL about it. MJI PSB has emailed WFAU to see what is happening regarding UKLight. From the WFAU minutes we understand that there is a delay at the EUCS end and that emails from higher up the food chain are being fired off. MJI has emailed Omar Almaini to find out which extra UDS 05B nights need reprocessing but has not yet received a reply. MR noted that 6-7 nights have already been reprocessed for UDS. MJI will find out more at the UKIDSS meeting on Friday. RGM has not finished working on the classification aspect of cross-talk weeding - ongoing <<<< JRL has not added a detection filter FWHM choice as a command line option of the pipeline version of imcore - ongoing <<<< PSB updated the ETC documentation regarding pawprints JRL has emailed Sandra Castro to find out about the Paranal hardware requirements and acquired a document describing it JRL tested out the Plone site as if external user. DWE said that the issues he raised have been dealt with. ALL had not sent in quarterly reports to STH. These would be needed in time for the UK Review - ongoing <<<< 2. Comments on WFAU minutes All is quiet on the comments on the minutes front. 3. Brief WFCAM update MJI said that all of 06A has now been checked and has been flagged for copying as of 1st October. Much copying up to Edinburgh is happening. Differential astrometric distortions as a function of passband have been investigated and found to be significantly different eg. for K the r-cubed distortion coefficient is -60 and for Z it is -44. This is as expected. The corollary is that it is definitely worth updating the astrometric WCS solution in the headers since the maximum systematic residual reduces by more than a factor of two from ~100mas to significantly less than ~50mas. This investigation was based on 2 weeks of 05B data with half a million stars in the K analysis and ~150000 stars in the other bands. PSB wondered how much data was being considered for doing the equivalent during VISTA commissioning. MJI added that the RA and declination columns in the catalogues were being updated (by default) but that this should not be significant since these are only stored as single-precision real numbers anyway (for dumb overlay programmes) and should not be used for maximum celestial coordinate accuracy. There was some discussion on how this, and related photometric calibration updates, were going to be dealt with between CASU and the WFAU science archive. RGM pointed out that SDSS used a separate calibration table for this purpose. DWE pointed out that the Plone technical pages on astrometry will need updating. <<<< MJI said that MR had a request from an Indian astronomer regarding access to the processed data. Both MJI and MR thought that the processed data release policy for world-wide access was ~12-18 months after general UKIDSS access. However, after asking this of Ms. Google they were somewhat surprised to find a completely different statement. MJI reminded us that he would be attending the UKIDSS meeting in Nottingham on Friday the 13th and would raise this matter there. <<<< He also noted that various UKIRT new project Letters of Intent were being circulated to those likely to interested. If anyone wants to be part of the science exploitation of these projects talk with MJI. The deadline for these proposals is 3rd November. WJS was curious about where the observing time for these projects would come from. 4. Report from VISTA meeting (see orig for details) PSB reported on the "very interesting and enlightening" VISTA commissioning meeting he and WJS attended in Edinburgh on 5 and 6 October. They summarised progress and the schedule for the: mirrors, telescope, and camera inc. wavefront sensors. Pipeline: There was some discussion about possible use of the VDFS pipeline to help with some of the commissioning tasks and how CASU members could best contribute relevant expertise for these. Summit pipeline hardware: ESO are writing the specification for this. PSB was worried about the lack of urgency in starting the procurement process, which he thought might compromise the goal of having all of the infrastructure in place for VIRCAM first light (let alone camera checkout). Generator: this is turned off at night when requested by the VLT operators, which could lead to an interesting commissioning schedule. MJI asked about the latest VISTA schedule since this would probably be required for the UK Review. PSB said he would request the current official schedule in time for the review. <<<< MJI also asked about the new read mode. WJS said that this would be available and configurable on-the-fly, but would need corresponding dark frames and, presumably, further testing during commissioning. 5. UK VDFS review All the CASU and WFAU documents required for the review were "delivered" on time. At the recent VDMT meeting an action was placed on MJI and NCH to ask members of their teams to read each others set of documents. After some discussion of this at the VDMT this was narrowed down to 3 primary documents, which for WFAU iare: VDF-WFA-VSA-002; -004; -006. The link to the WFAU documents can be found on http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/vdfs/ukreview/ It is hoped that we can have a CASU/WFAU/VDMT meeting on the Monday afternoon/evening before the review in order to coordinate our efforts. We are expecting 3-4 people from WFAU to attend. The meeting will start at 10:30am on the Tuesday with coffee ready from 10am. The meeting is scheduled to finish at 3:30pm, or thereabouts, on Wednesday. STH asked who should sit in on the review from CASU. MJI said that this would depend on what questions had been asked and what format the discussion ended up taking, but that anyone who wanted to sit through the whole review was welcome. MJI reminded us that there would be a meal on the Tuesday evening, but the venue was still to be decided. MJI asked for ideas for a suitable venue. <<<< The only comment that had been received so far was what happened to VIS-SPE-IOA-20000-0003 ? This has been superceded by the DRLD (VIS-SPE-IOA-20000-0010) as proscribed by 1618 (issue 2.0). 6. GAIA MJI noted that there was a Gaia meeting tomorrow at 11:30 and all who were interested in a role in the software development needed for GAIA photometric data processing were advised to attend. 7. AOB Power cut: there were no problems with the CASU machines from the recent scheduled weekend-long power cut. PSB, JRL, EGS and MR said that they would be off to ADASS on Saturday. STH noted he was off observing at KPNO from Thursday. DWE is away on hols from Wednesday for a long week. This leaves MJI to mind the shop until Monday 23rd. JRL said that he had found a new venue for the ADASS 2007 conference dinner - The Globe Theatre. We will still have a boat ride. Continuing Actions ------------------ JRL finish the fix to problem with UKIRT archive (missing header information) STH generate poster of supernova remnant image received from Albert Zijlstra STH investigate effects of stacking on 2MASS/WFCAM non-linearity comparison JRL repair AAT archive mirroring (PostgreSQL problems) MJI email new WFCAM colour equations to DWE and JRL STH RGM report back on classification aspect of cross-talk weeding JRL add detection filter FWHM choice as command line option of pipeline version of imcore. ALL send quarterly reports to STH New Actions ----------- STH agree new WFCAM colour equations with Calibration working group DWE update Plone technical pages on astrometry MJI MJI raise issue of UKIDSS data release policy at Nottingham meeting PSB request latest official VISTA schedule for use in UK Review ALL suggest suitable venue for UK Review meal (La Paloma, Tucson does not count)