CASU meeting Wednesday 26th February 11:30-13:00 APM Present: MJI, JRL, AKY, EGS, CGF, SC Apologies: MR, GM, NAW, JPE, STH, RGM Agenda: 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. Hardware update 4. Meetings and telecons 5. Data archives update 6. WFCAM update 7. VISTA update 8. VST update 9. Spectroscopic stuff 10. ESO in-kind stuff 11. AOB 1. Actions from last meeting ----------------------------- STH - further detailed analysis of VVV Bulge and disk fields is ongoing to MJI examine the extinction over the entire region. Better extinction maps CGF have been generated and analysis of the extinction calibrator coefficients and the zero-point offsets is still ongoing <<<< JRL - no further action on the apm5 issue on hold for now while other EGS things take precedence and still are <<<< MJI - VST dome flats-v-twilight flats also on hold though now we have some baffled flats from after the final installation it will be resurrected for the next meeting and for the upcoming PSP review <<<< GM - are composing a FAQs page or two and will present an update on CGF progress as the next meeting as STH was away. MJI asked if we could STH at least see the top level pages to see how things are looking <<<< EGS will send round the web link <<<< EGS - investigated the seeing = -1 and other odd values which are used as part of the pre-release checks. For junk images and/or cloudy/ sparse fields the seeing estimates can be somewhat unusual but c'est la guerre MJI - WFCAM for October got released though the web pages are still playing catchup due to the upgraded security EGS - took pity and sent a text file of the latest VST and VISTA grades SC - system update tests on hold but in the queue <<<< GM - has brought the raw VISTA tape backups up to date MJI - WFCAM data for November and December have also been released EGS - updated the VISTA long term ZP trend monitoring plots which showed the previous seasonal dip was ...... well ...... seasonal MJI - VST releases have been kicked into gear up to end of January JRL - has not yet tested the supplmentary astrometry fields for HAWKI and VIMOS - ongoing <<<< 2. WFAU minutes --------------- As noted earlier, the grades were dispatched. It might be a good idea to agree a synchronised grade upgrading timescale. Six monthly prior to the OPC report submitting deadline e.g. aligned with say mid-way through the ESO telescope proposal deadline months would make sense. 3. Hardware update (and software) ------------------ A new RAID array has been ordered and delivery is expected next week. APM's 45 through 49 have dual channel fibre cards so even without daisy chaining there is a choice of 5 machines to connect it to. As the VVV season is nearly up on us it will be used for VISTA processed data. Quite which machine will depend on the fibre run. Mains sockets are in short supply due to the ridiculous number of main plugs required these days for each piece of kit. SC will ask Mike L to make up some more 4-way distribution sockets to attach to the commando sockets. <<<< Catching up on raw data archiving rapidly depleted the stock of LTO4 tapes and SC will order some more. <<<< As noted earlier the software updates for APM's 44-49 got delayed by reality and will happen at some convenient future data TBD as they are not yet urgent. Assorted fascinating NTP vulnerabilities and Plone spamming gateway opportunities were picked up by the friendly!? UCS probing and were fixed. Quite why all these loopholes are left open by default software installations is another matter. 4. Meetings and telecons ------------------------- The VMC monthly skypecon was missed by all due to other meetings. There was a VISTA IOT on February 4th with EGS, JRL and CGF paying attention for CASU. Among other fascinating items were: -- filter offsets VDI wants to monitor the performance of the filter wheel in terms of its positional accuracy. Some observations will be taken and analysed by WHU, though to date no catastrophic effects have been noted -- survey progress VVV is complaining that some of its OBs have been executed out of constraint. These will be repeated. The ESO public survey panel will meet in Apr and will discuss whether to continue VVV and VHS past P95 among other things -- SADT sacre bleu the odd gripes about the current version -- gain calculation WHU wants the gain recipe to destripe before flat fielding. Malheureusement as you can't see the stripes before flat fielding there's probably not much point. JRL will try and think of something polite to say. There is a VVV survey workshop nr. Vina del Mar 3-5 April and CFG will attend and give a CASU plus some science talk. There was a WEAVE meeting nr. Schipol 12-13 February which NAW and EGS attended. All is going well on that front with the desired data management tasks allocated to CASU and the others to IAC++. The biweekly OU-VIS Euclid validation process telecons continue apace with MJI doing the honours for these while the more generic Euclid telecons are handled by NAW and EGS who will attend the next get together in Paris. MJI had a productive meeting with representatives of one of the new "owners" of UKIRT to discuss the extra special purpose processing requirements. ESO recently announced a PSP VST and VISTA review meeting at ESO 28,29th April which EGS and MJI will attempt to wangle an invitation to given the restriction (2) on the nos. per PI project. <<<< There is a VST ATLAS workshop in Durham from 14th-16th April. So if you want a chance to stay in Durham Castle make the most of the opportunity. 5. Data archives update - AAT, ING, WFCAM, UKIRT, VISTA, VST ------------------------ VISTA is now back up to date thanks to GM. VST is a little behind but won't take long to sort out. <<<< All the other raw data archives are up to date. Interestingly JRL got an email from the AAO about the AAO archive suggesting they are interested in improving it. He hasn't gotten back to them yet, but will do shortly. <<<< UVEX processing is still on hold. EGS finally managed to copy all the Subaru data over prior to processing some deep Subaru fields for the usual suspects. As predicted the heavy Bulgarian user of the ING archive desisted after being asked what they were using the data for. 6. WFCAM update ---------------- Apparently two cubic metres of old WFCAM sdf tapes at JAC are looking for a new home/skip. As we have inordinate copies of the WFCAM raw data to hand we politely declined to house them here. As of the end of 2013 there are no more transfers of raw WFCAM data to ESO so that little joy is now curtailed. The last month or so has been spent catching up on the "lost" processed WFCAM data and finishing off the last dregs of 2013 processing/calibration. The last 3 months (Oct-Dec) of conventional WFCAM processed data has now been finished off and released. Some of the earlier subdirs still lack various semaphore flags but these are being put back as and when they crop up as missing. Slightly hidden from view WFCAM processing continues apace with a mix of normal astro data (albeit a small part), much tracked data and the odd bit of weird mode test data. The new modes have involved creating and testing to destruction a new post-processing pipeline toolkit. Most of the development for this is now finished, it just needs running. Apparently there will be a formal handover ceremony of UKIRT on the 27th March in Hilo at which the great and the good, plus one of us, will be present. We intend to take this opportunity to discuss the "new" processing requirements in further detail and also to attempt to keep the new users on the straight and narrow regarding observing modes and sensible MSB use. Now that the processed WFCAM data to end of 2013 has either been recovered and/or checked and/or booted out the door, a start to easing the backlog of WFCAM reprocessing requests will begin. These include: the usual GPS request for more nebulising this time for DR10; the UHS leftover reprocessing from earlier days aka coercing the pipeline to not use pawskymask for dribs and drabs of incomplete tile fill ins; and last but not least and indeed likely to be first, fixing the handful of "broken" files as requested by WFAU. 7. VISTA update ---------------- December and January are processed and calibrated and are being ingested into the database as part of final checks. These will be released shortly. Further processing i.e. February awaits the availability of enough flats to generate decent calibration files. After a bit of discussion and given the recent arrival of some updated VIDEO object masks, this was felt to be a good time to replace the reprocessed VIDEO data with a newer version. CFG and JRL will look into doing this. <<<< There have been surprisingly few grumbles about the network IP access restrictions for processed VISTA data, so the restriction will remain in place. Eckhard reported a few more "broken" pawprint catalogue files. These will be investigated and fixed, hopefully in a similar manner to the previous lot. As noted earlier the tape backups for VISTA are now all current. The last traceable/documented backup was in mid-2012. GM used 41 LTO4 tapes to back everything up through Jan 2014 and updated the webpage. There was a query regarding astrometric distortion coefficient changes. For the record our advice is always to use the values in the FITS file headers unless you are planning to further refine the WCS solution. To recap, after the first year or two of operation we slightly changed the values of PV2_3,PV2_5 42.0,-10000.0 to 44.0, -10300.0 to give improved performance near the outer edges of the array. The switchover took place 20101130/20101201 and we did not redo the astrometry of the earlier files. MJI asked the FAQ'ers to make sure this info gets in the relevant web page suppository too. <<<< 8. VST update -------------- Monika P-R asked if we had quantified the surface brightness levels, and positions, of ghosts and reflections over VST operations. The short answer was no, the slightly longer answer was that the User Manual is not bad on this topic, and the open ended answer was that anyone who is interested can have as much as data as they care to use in an investigation. Ingest, processing and release is up to date with data to the end of January available. The next phase of improved baffling was supposed to happen in February which may explain the 5 nights of no data at the start of the month, otherwise there has been a deafening silence to indicate it did, or did not, take place. Regardless MJI will compare flats with ones from late last year to see if any significant change. [The OmegaCAM newspage, where ESO maintain a record of all important instrument and telescope changes/issues http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/paranal/instruments/omegacam/news.html says nada.] All of the new AB magnitude zeropoints from APASS have been generated but only for the fixed catalogues. These still need extensive testing on large survey areas to find the best way to make use of them. In turns out that the Gaia satellite was extensively observed throughout January as part of the campaign to provide accurate astrometry to help with orbit reconstruction. NAW (after the meeting) expressed an interest in looking into this. 9. Spectroscopic stuff ----------------------- Gaia-ESO: the iDR3 release is imminently imminent and the draft of the processing paper has been doing the rounds with much feedback on the sky estimation sermon. Nothing new to report on WEAVE, 4MOST and MOONS other than the WEAVE meeting previously mentioned. 10. ESO in-kind stuff --------------------- There was the usual 6 monthly review of progress with ESO and STFC representatives. For once we knew about it in advance and supplied a briefing of progress which must have gone down well as we have heard nothing untoward back. A report from ESO on the v0.5 HAWKI reduction delivered last October was extremely positive. A report on the v0.5 VIMOS reduction is expected soon. Work on the pipeline software has now resumed. MJI asked about updating the web pages and adding QC database interface to enable searches of what in the processed data store. EGS will look into this. <<<< There has been no feedback from ESO on the delivered workflows so work on the user visualisation side is proceeding. 11. AOB ------- GM had a good excuse for not attending the meeting having been sleep deprived by the arrival of his first progeny, a baby girl, on the 21st. Continuing actions ------------------ STH - compute the ZP offsets for the VISTA calibration for y,z-band and MJI update the extinction calibrator coefficients as necessary etc.. CGF JRL - keep reporting no further progress with retiring our apm5 Sybase server EGS MJI - are the VST dome flats that stable and how do they cf. to twilights particularly now that baffles have been installed GM - keep on producing the FAQ pages and load up the front end asap CFG so the rest of us can browse the style STH SC - update system software on apm48 and see what breaks JRL - test out supplmentary astrometry fields for HAWKI and VIMOS New actions ----------- EGS - email the web link of the entry point of the FAQ pages SC - order some 4-way distribution sockets to attach to the commando units SC - order yet more LTO4 tapes MJI - wangle an invitation to the PSP review JRL - catch up with the VST raw data tape archiving JRL - contact AAO about their plans for improving the archive CFG - find the latest VIDEO object masks and begin the process of JRL regenerating the VIDEO processed data STH - make sure the astrometric info herein makes it to the FAQ pages CFG EGS - create a processed data DB for HAWKI and VIMOS along the lines of VST, VISTA and WFCAM