Thursday 26th August 2010 APM Meeting tables 11:30 - 13:00 =========================================================== =========================================================== Present: JCR, MJI, STH, EGS, JRL, AKY, RGM, JPE Apologies: MR, NAW 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. Meetings and Telecons 4. Data archives update - AAT, ING, WFCAM, UKIRT, VISTA 5. Optical/NIR processing - HAWKI, INT WFC, MegaCam, Subaru, VST 6. WFCAM update 7. VISTA update 8. CASUhelps 9. AOB Minutes ======= 1. Actions from the last meeting -------------------------------- JRL The first two lots of documentation are done and dusted, the rest is EGS ongoing and will be completed soon. STH Has compared the extinction law calibration of VISTA to WFCAM. The agree to within a few % except K-band which agrees to within 5%. STH Has calibrated AB from VEGA & agrees with Paul to 1/1000 (using same spectra) MJI Has added an illumination table option. Needs to be linked in the web pages. EGS Has made great progress with SV processing, it will soon be up to where v0.8 was. SC Have comprehensively explored VISTA disk storage options. ZFS has been MJI abondoned in favour of `supermicro'. More later... JRL Has contacted Sybase regarding their hopeful demand for megabucks. CDS were also paying £1000 per year for their licenses and are as shocked as us. No answer from Sybase as yet. Decided best not to stick head above parapet. JRL Has examined the reason for some peculiar stacked images in WFCAM DR8. They've been fixed but the problem is so rare it's not worth doing anything more about. 2. WFAU minutes ---------------- WFAU now have the stacking software but not the tiling tools. As it is, only VMC and, very occasionally, VVV will need tiling anyway. RGM said something very confusing about APERTUREMAGS which are now called APERNOCOR while for apertures of 7 to 13 there are no corrections..... The genral gist of which seemed to be that pont sources will be aperture corrected in some fashion whereas extended sources wont. 3. Meetings and Telecons ------------------------ VISTA: The camera has been recentred and tilted with respect to the optical axis to correct for the slight focus gradient. It's now re-aligned as good as will ever get. Everything seems to be working well except for a few minor issues: The good news is that the primary mirror has been recoated and now has the thickness of protective coating it was meant to have from the beginning. The bad news is that this is not thick enough. The second mirror has not been recoated in its three year lifetime and relectivity is deteriorating to ~80%. Marina is still iterating on the OB grades. JPE raised a few things that had come up during a VMC telecon and they were clarified: First, the images themselves have no nebulosity filter but the catalogues do. Second, CASU will provide no corrections for saturated star magnitudes, this is best done by the end user by refering to MJI's article in the UKIRT news letter. Upcoming Meetings ----------------- There's a VST review at ESO on 28/29th September. The agenda features some relevant talks - pipelines, QC process talks, astrowise, VSTUBE pipeline - and there's a CASU talk slot too. JENAM is in Portugal on 6 - 11 September. 4. Data Archive --------------- ING, AAO, UKIRT, VISTA all up to date. 5. Optical / NIR Processing --------------------------- Everything ticking along nicely. There was some debate about HAWKI though. There are some papers on the Chandra study of Carina which need going through to establish which should include CASU memebers in the authorlist. 6. WFCAM Update --------------- All is going smoothly. All the 10A data has been released and was transfered to Edinburgh by 22nd August. 10B was started on 1st August. 3 weeks ago Chris Davies asked about some missing data he'd taken on 29th July 2009. The chip 4 data was missing for that night. A slight anomaly regarding the extinction correction as a function of colour has been spotted by Phil Lucas. The calibration is outside of spec for areas of high extinction, B-V > 10 (e.g. 0.005 rather than 0.003). He's on the case but it shouldn't cause too many problems for most people. STH and MJI will investigate from here. 7. VISTA Update --------------- We will be up to date with releases by the end of the week. Up to the end of May v1.0 has been released and up to the end of July will be released by tomorrow (Friday 27th August). We have data up to 11th August. There were a few bad nights with no data where the weather was too bad for anyone to get to the telescope. JRL and AKY are going to introduce new flags into the raw data directories to mark up when there is 'no data' or 'unprocessed data'. There needs to be a consistant way of treating junk data. Following JRL's lead a new policy was converged upon. If the data is good enough to process (e.g. 4+ good frames) then it gets processed. If there's less than that (e.g. < 4 frames, or 4 low quality cloudy frames) then they get deleted and an explanation is entered into a README file. As with WFCAM, the individual images should be kept but the stack can be chucked. When this happens it should be recorded so that PIs are aware and can adapt their stategies. It was noted that the OB stasus' are in the headers (since October) and are in a table on the web pages too. 8. CASUhelps ------------ MJI read out examples of some foolish and some serious pleas for help that have been received. In general, if people looked thoroughly at the web pages before asking questions they would spare themselves some embarrassment! One valid item was that the galaxy specific measure needs to be replaced with an ellipse. Also, at some point in the future the zeropoints of the 6 pawprints making a tile need to be merged so they're not discontinuous. 9. AOB -------- SC is updating the computer blades to UBUNTU. A solution has been found to provide more storage space for VISTA in the form of 'supermicro'. This is a PC with lots of accessible disk slots. It comes with 36 2TB disks and can be bulked up with JPOD extensions of 24 disks. This option is significantly cheaper than the other alternatives so we are investing in one of the PCs (~70TB) to start with and an extension will come soon bringing it up to ~120 TB of raid 6 storage. It comes with a 1kW power supply and a spare. This PC will be essentially the same as apm 18 and apm19. It will probably be split into 4 file systems with 30TB each. Continuing Actions: =================== STH - Finish off last bits of calibration plan document update JRL JPE - Produce some text to go with the VISTA PR images JPE - To contact ESO re: signing off pipeline deliverables EGS - SV time again still #2 STH MJI JRL - Tie up loose ends with the sky subtraction. New Actions: ============ MJI - Put in a link to the illumination corrections on the website. JPE - Arrange for MJI to sit in on VMC telecons to nip potential problems in the bud. STH - Go through Chandra/Carina papers and identify those CASU should be on. JRL - Find the HAWKI data so we can check how it was done etc.. STH - Investigate gradual drift off spec of extinction corrections in high MJI extinction regions in VISTA. JPE - Find out whan Phase 3 meeting is. JRL - Add new flags in raw data directories for instances of 'no data' AKY ? - Replace circular galaxy aperture with an elliptical one.