18 March 2004 Hoyle meeting room 10.30 - 12.30 Present: STH, JRL, PSB, WJS, DWE Apologies: MJI, RGM Agenda ------ 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. Report from Q1M2 VDMT: Friday 5th March 4. Report from JAC telecon: Friday 12th March 5. Report and update on VISTA Camera Calibration meeting and progress towards PDR 6. Discussion of UK VISTA Pipeline v0.4 (WJS) 7. Update on APM building plans 8. AOB Minutes ------- 1. Actions from last meeting STH has finished the bright star checking of the photometric standard fields. This is based on 2MASS data and all fields in the calibration plan have been checked. However it does depend on exactly what the saturation limit is. WJS said that he would send the current best estimates to STH. <<<< WJS pointed out a few sparse regions in the plan and requested a few extra fields just to the North of VISTA's zenith. STH said that he would fill in these gaps. <<<< STH has made no progress regarding the spatial systematics in the UFTI standards data and new test data - ongoing <<<< JRL has again emailed Adam and Benoit regarding the WFCAM example FITS headers and files. JRL said that he will phone Michelle Peron to clarify the situation. <<<< STH has acquired the missing ISAAC data. MJI no information regarding comparison of FIRES project reduced data with ours - ongoing <<<< STH has not calibrated FIRES data using NICMOS or the published FIRES work - ongoing <<<< STH sent the transformations from 2MASS to UFTI filters to JRL. JRL writing a report on ISAAC reductions is ongoing <<<< MJI JRL no example calibration frames to test the ingest procedure have been MJI sent to IAB. JRL promises he will do so soon. <<<< ALL commenting on Paul Hirst's User Guide was delayed due to a delayed JAC STH telecon and then the calibration plan meeting. JAC did not mention this at the rescheduled telecon. However, comments should be done by the next CASU meeting. JRL will collate the comments. <<<< STH raised the issue of the name of the "UK User Requirements" document at the VDMT meeting. The current name is "VISTA DFS UK User Requirements Document". There were still worries about the name and it will be changed if we can come up with a better name. STH at the VDMT meeting asked for clarification on what VDFS delivers to ESO. The answer from JPE was that it was all in VLT-SPE-ESO-19000-1618. STH raised the issue (also at the VDMT meeting) of a date for the first VDUC meeting. No date has currently been set. ALL sent in 04Q1m2 reports to STH. WJS sent minutes of the Telescope Calibration Meeting to PSB who said that they were quite interesting. 2. Comments on WFAU minutes PSB and DWE had noted the reference to "earned values". STH said that he had already received an email about this and that these statistics will be used in future project documents. The currently supplied information should be sufficient to calculate the new statistics. The transfer of data tests were noted and seem fine. 3. Report from Q1M2 VDMT: Friday 5th March STH said that he had raised the various issues required (see Section 1) and that the meeting had gone well. Progress was ok. 4. Report from JAC telecon: Friday 12th March JRL said that the telecon was short and sweet. The 2 main issues were: (a) creating copies of the WFCAM data for ourselves at the summit. There are problems relating to the creation of MEF files from the SDF files as the Starlink convert utility cannot create MEFs and there was a reluctance within the JAC to have the ORACDR infrastructure dependent on either CFITSIO or CIRDR. Because there will be four summit pipelines (one for each chip) we can solve this problem by allowing ORACDR to create a simple FITS file. The the first step of the reduction recipe is to create a tile compressed MEF that will be stored away and eventually written to tape for us. The summit pipeline will then work on the simple FITS file. (b) the question of real vs. integer data. ATC are having problems making some processes work with integer data as the standard for UKIRT is to output reals. JAC also have pointed out the scenario of multiple NDR observations with narrow band filters would lead to small real values which would suffer were the data type to be transformed to integer. We would like to have integer data mainly because the data are essentially integer anyway and also because we can achieve a lossless compression with integer data. It was agreed that the DAS would write real format data and that the MEFs that are to be created in the recipes for transfer to Cambridge would be converted to integer and compressed except in the minority of cases like the above where it would be clearly inappropriate. The next JAC telecon will be Tuesday 23rd March. 5. Report and update on VISTA Camera Calibration meeting and progress towards PDR The minutes/notes of this meeting can be seen at: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/vdfs/docs/camera_calibration_meeting.html A lot of useful feedback has been received by PSB since the meeting and much discussion has been done by email. There will be a telecon tomorrow (19th March) at 9:30 to further progress the Calibration Plan. The Cambridge end will be in JRL's office. It was felt that while the work on the Calibration Plan was well in hand, there was a need to review (within CASU) the other two documents needed for the PDR. In order to do this it was agreed that we all read the Data Reduction Specification and the User Requirements Document and provide feedback as soon as possible. We would then have a small meeting (PSB, WJS, JRL, DWE) on 25th March in JRL's office (10am) to discuss these documents. <<<< 6. Discussion of UK VISTA Pipeline v0.4 (WJS) http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~wfcam/internal/vdfsdocs/VDFS_urd04.ps.gz Version 0.4 has been released for some time and not much feedback has been received (especially external). WJS said that he needed comments from WFAU and JPE. We should all have another look at this and provide some feedback.<<<< This document is needed for the VDUC meeting. DWE will also sort out a document number for this. <<<< 7. Update on APM building plans We have now all seen the drawing plans and are reasonably happy with things. The issue of telephone lines was raised. It was decided that this was a detail that can be sorted out later. It should be noted that STH has taken PSB up on his bet (see minutes of last meeting). 8. AOB The next CASU meeting will be on 2nd April 10am, with the next VDMT meeting on the 5th April. Continuing Actions ------------------ STH finish looking at the spatial systematics in the UFTI standards data and new test data JRL iterate on WFCAM example FITS headers and files with Adam and Benoit (phone Michelle Peron to clarify the situation). MJI compare FIRES project reduced data with ours STH calibrate FIRES data using NICMOS or the published FIRES work JRL finish report on ISAAC reductions MJI JRL send some example calibration frames to test the ingest procedure MJI to IAB. ALL send comments on Paul Hirst's User Guide to STH by next meeting (JRL to collate). New Actions ----------- WJS send best estimates of VISTA saturation limit to STH STH fill in sparse regions of photometric standard fields plan and add a few more fields just to the North of VISTA's zenith. ALL read the Data Reduction Specification and the User Requirements Document and provide feedback as soon as possible to PSB (meeting 25th March). ALL read V0.4 of the VISTA DFS UK User Requirements Document and provide feedback for WJS. DWE provide document number for VISTA DFS UK User Requirements Document