From j.p.emerson@qmul.ac.uk Fri Sep 5 10:55:18 2008 Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:03:34 +0100 From: Jim Emerson To: Mike Irwin , Nigel Hambly Subject: [Fwd: News from VISTA/Orion SV] more on sv -------- Original Message -------- Subject: News from VISTA/Orion SV Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:22:53 +0200 From: mpetr@eso.org To: mpetr@eso.org CC: Cesar Briceno , Juan Alcala , tstanke@eso.org, Fernando Comeron , Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio , hzinnecker@aip.de, mjm@astro.ex.ac.uk, jmelnick@eso.org, ghussain@eso.org, sramsey@eso.rg Dear friends of Orion, You may be wondering how things proceeded after the submission of our VISTA SV Orion proposal at the beginning of August. I have good news: the proposal has now been officially approved! How to proceed? The current schedule foresees to perform the actual observations during the second half of January. The observations will be carried out by a group of people (no final list of names yet) from the ESO survey team, from the Paranal Science Operations group, and from the UK Vista Consortium. Jorge Melnick and myself will also most likely participate. Once the data is taken, it will be processed via the VISTA pipelines at Cambridge and Edinburgh (CASU and WFAU) (see for example: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jpe/vdfs/ http://www.vista.ac.uk/vdfs/index.html) Testing the data flow is an essential part of the science verification process, and I expect that the Orion survey will play a major role in this regard. According to the ESO science verification data policy there will be no proprietary time on the Orion data, but of course, we would be among the first to look at it. **** And this is where you can come in: **** You may want to prepare your students, postdocs, and yourself to analyse, evaluate and exploit the VISTA Orion data after it has gone through the pipelines. Our feedback on the data quality, achieved sensitivities, calibrations, identification of incorrectly processed data, artefacts etc. will be extremely important for the validation of the proccessing stages, instrument performances, and for the success of the VISTA public surveys in general. But I am pretty sure that, in the end, the scientific return will be worth the efforts. As things must be planned well ahead, it is probably best if we agree on how to organize the work now. Since the data is processed on a tile-by-tile basis, the analysis and evaluation could, for example, be done as well for distinct regions (main molecular cloud, Ori 1a assoc., sigma Ori, etc.). Although from your particular contributions to the definition of the Orion mini-survey, the association of certain people with certain regions/tasks seems obvious, I don't want to impose anything on anyone, of course. ** Please let me know which particular field/region (or sub-task if you prefer) you wish to work on. Or, if you prefer to do something complete else. ** It would also be great if you have already an idea of the manpower at hand. The timeline for the work has not been set explicitely, but given that the start of the Public Surveys observations, which need feedback from the SV surveys, is almost at the same time, feedback shall be send as soon as possible. A description of the VISTA SV projects will soon become public on the ESO Public-Survey page at: http://www.eso.org/sci/observing/policies/PublicSurveys/ On this page you will also find a link to the "ESO Public Survey Phase2 Workshop" which will take place at ESO Garching on Sept 15-17. The workshop is not really intended for the overall public, but if you happen to be at ESO or nearby during these days, you may find it interesting to stop by. On Wednesday, Sept 17, I will present the Orion Survey to the Public Survey PIs in a 15min talk. It would be great if you could send me your work commitment for the Orion SV data analysis before the start of the workshop. All the best, Monika