CASU meeting Wednesday February 23rd 11:30-13:00 CASU meeting area. Present: MJI, AKY, EGS, SC, JCR Apologies: STH, NAW, RGM, MR, JPE Agenda: 1. Actions from last meeting 2. Comments on WFAU minutes 3. Hardware update 4. Meetings and telecons 5. Data archives update 6. Optical/NIR processing 7. WFCAM update 8. VISTA update 9. AOB Minutes ======= 1. Actions from the last meeting -------------------------------- STH - the VISTA colour equation extinction dependence has been sorted MJI which was required before we can sign off the calibration for Version 1.1 of the data products. The residual scatter (0.1 mag) above E(B-V)=10 had been proving troublesome. STH - the WFCAM extinction calibration is also completed MJI MJI - updated the summary tables total exposure time column to account for occasional missing dither components, will do for v1.1 AKY - liaised with Henry from UltraVISTA and found that the artifacts around bright stars n'existe pas. A revised action is now to acquire an example of their images to investigate - ongoing MJI - has contacted KK about processing VST KIDS data STH - produced a colour transformation predicting i-band mags (for guide stars in SADT) from 2MASS JHKs photometry. It looks like we can predict i-band mags to within 0.1mag given JHKs. STH has robustified the simple linear fits and characterised the extinction dependence. Now it just needs putting on the web pages <<<< AKY - started to investigate the question of the evolution of the flat-fields with time: looking at systematic noise/feature changes on different scales, and rms noise properties - ongoing <<<< STH - has checked encore une fois possible causes of wfcam -v- vista mag slopes JRL - have found out what's afoot at vvv.survey.org. Lots of colourful EGS pictures mainly! MJI - complete v1.0 -> v1.1 process by February 28th <<<< EGS AKY 2. Comments on WFAU Minutes --------------------------- None. 3. Hardware Update ------------------ The Supermicro 45-bay JBOD expansion module is still sat on the floor due to an incompatibility between SAS1 and the updated SAS2 - a new card will be installed. 4. Meetings and Telecons ------------------------ The next VISTA IOT will (tentatively) be on 14th April. This has been postponed due to the telescope down-time while it's re-coated. There's a VMC Sype-Con tomorrow (Thursday 24th February). There's a week long VVV meeting at Uni.Herts. from 18th July. This will be all the galactic plane stuff in optical and nIR. NAM will be at Llandudno from 17 - 21 April. Based on years of family days out to the aforementioned place, JCR recommends a visit to 'Happy Valley' on the Great Orme which has pretty views, a cable car, toboggan run and dry ski slope. The name says it all really! http://www.greatorme.org.uk/Trail9.html 5. Data archives update ------------------------ All going very nicely thank you. 6. Optical/NIR processing -------------------------- This seems to be proceeding nicely too. 7. WFCAM update ---------------- WFCAM has again suffered due to bad weather. The good news is that while scraping the ice off some muck was removed improving the zero points. ESO transfers are up to date. Processed data has only been released up to the end of November and so is slightly behind. There have been multiple queries about early access to the data from vigilant PIs. There is a possibility that the lifetime of UKIDSS may be extended for a few more years. This and many fascinating facts can be found in the new 'Memorandum of Understanding' on the JAC/management website. 8. VISTA update ---------------- We have received new data up until 9th February. All data up until January 31st has been processed to v1.0. The release of v1.1 data up until November 2010 will happen at the end of the month. EGS has been monitoring the internet transfer of data from ESO to CASU following JPE's request for a test on the efficiency. So far he has transferred one month of data and noticed a variable transfer rate - between 0.9 Mb/s to 2.5 Mb/s per thread. With 8 threads running in parallel this works out as between 700 Mb/min - 1 Gb/min. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason behind the fluctuations but overall this looks promising. It remains to be checked that the disks and ftp'd data are exactly equivalent. VISTA will be down between 4th March and 7th April while the mirror is re-coated with Aluminium. The quality of the existing Silver based coating is decaying too rapidly. There was a discussion about the re-processing for v1.1. The additional improvements to upgrade from v1.0 to v1.1 are: * re-running the classifier on all paw-print catalogues; * re-running the photometry on all paw-print catalogues; * generating monthly detector zero-point updates (and illum corrs); * FITS header updates on all paw-print catalogues/images; * running the grouting code on the tile catalogues; * followed by tile catalogue re-classification, re-photometry; * and finally header updates on tile images or to summarise, no change to images, just header updates, some changes to catalogue table contents and headers. The philosophy to be adopted is that, unless there is a global problem, fixes should be performed as we go along rather than re-doing the whole lot each time a minor bug crops up. JRL has implemented information about the variation of the Julian date across the field (in column 63). It was decided that all v1.0 catalogues should be saved for now (action already completed by EGS). They can be used to record examples of before / after. Regarding Phase III delivery, we will deliver the products from VIDEO, VVV and VHS to ESO. We'll need to get their lists of the tiles that they want to be selected A.S.A.P. Apparently ESO want band-merged catalogues but they have caused some confusion about what 'band-merged' means. According to an unknown specification it says someone else will do this anyway. Apparently, all will become clear during a possibly asymmetric window of time centred on the 1st April. 9. CASUHELPs ------------- Saturated star questions continue to plague MJI. Another gem was someone asking how to combine four FITS files into a multi-extension FITS file. Someone queried CASU's morphological classification based on their comparison of deep VIDEO data (using Sextractor) to VHS. AOB --- After much discussion between CASU and STFC, and STFC and ESO, and ESO and CASU an agreement about payments in kind has been reached which should start in the summer. This could provide three 3yr jobs with secure (i.e. non-STFC) funding. Continuing Actions: =================== MJI - carry on with v1.0 -> v1.1 process - due for release on Feb 28 EGS AKY AKY - continue flat-field properties investigations MJI - plot detector 0pt trends for Oct-Nov period. AKY - get some Henry's UltraVISTA images to investigate the cause of artifacts around bright stars. problem is not in CASU processing. STH - put refined 2MASS JHKs -> i-band predictor on web pages New Actions: ============ MJI - forwards NAM e-mail to rest of CASU EGS - compare data from disk and internet transfers. Identical? AKY EGS - contact Matt and Richards for a list of tiles MJI - note on web explaining that even if a tile has good QC an individual paw-print could be dodgy EGS - update web-page about ESO grades (and check consistency)