Minutes for Telecon for Feb 12, 2002

Present: Churchwell, Whitney, Watson, Meade, Stolovy, Dickey, Ashman,
Indebetouw, Wolfire, Babler, Kobulnicky, Clemens, Jackson, Benjamin

Next telecon: Tuesday Feb 26, 2002, 11 am CST, 608-265-1000 #4112


Validation Observation Program - Chip and Christer

 see the handout at http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~chip/SIRTF/IOC.pdf
 which shows the proposed Verification Plan

 Christer went over the proposed GLIMPSE Verification Plan.
 There will be 5 iterations of 4 AORs in the W51 region.
 Then wait 5 -10 days and repeat one pass of the 4 AORs
 at a different roll angle. (The AORs are each 35 x 2 except
 for pass 6D which covers the entire -1 deg to +1 deg area.)
 We may not be able to get a pass 5 -10 days later according
 to Tony.  There may be only one IRAC campaign in the
 Verification window.  We would like to test the observing
 at different roll angles because of banding. We should
 set a minimum requirement of time between pass 5 and 6.
 In this region, the roll angle changes only 0.6 deg/day.
 We chose the W51 region because it gives us good dynamic range.
 It was suggested to go from -1 deg to 0 deg instead of centering
 on W51 so we get a high source density area and a low source
 density area.  It was also suggested to test different overlaps.
 It was decided to have a different overlap for the different
 passes (nominal is 12 pixels).

Criteria for success

 Precision of our photometry and meet scientific goals.

AOR Modification window - Ed

 AORs for verification program due April 1.  Can modify all AORs April -June
 with the new version of SPOT (and for the new launch date presumably).

PSE comparisons,Simulated data - Remy, Brian

  Brian and Remy have been comparing DAOPHOT results to the SSC PSE.
  The SSC PSE is not giving good results. Running the same data through
  several times gives different results.  We may not be running it
  correctly or not have all the files we need.  Susan was going to
  check into this for us.
  Photometry on single frames is continuing and work is being done on tweaking
  the simulated data.
  Ed contacted Neil Evans about possibly combining efforts. Lee Mundy and
  Mark Wolfire will be points of contact between the 2 teams.  Lee will
  be looking into PSE issues in hopes of finding a better method to extract
  sources from IRAC data.

Pipeline processing - Barb, Marilyn

  Barb wrote a program which creates the ancillary data (bad pixel mask,
  poor quality mask, CR mask, latent image mask, photometric uncertainty image,
  ghost image) for each calibrated image.  This data set will be used for
  pipeline development and for the QLVT. Mike & Marilyn have been working on OPUS.
  OPUS is now running on both solaris and linux machines.

Back-up Observing Plan

  Will our AOR-writer be flexible enough? What if we need more passes at same roll
  angle or more passes at different roll angles?  After 2 passes, what if
  photometry not reliable? Will we want the "1/2 step" AORs or our original
  plan of revisits?

Science Specification Document - Team

  Barb & Ed wrote a document entitled "Star Formation with SIRTF/IRAC Plus 2MASS"
  which will be incorporated into the Science Specification Document.  We have
  also received a writeup from Tony on WRs. Dan said they need 0.2 mag accuracy for
  the galactic structure science.  We need more input from the
  team ASAP; please send whatever you have by March 8 (or sooner).

Other

  Remy provided raw simulated IRAC data to the SSC for them to run through
  the SSC pipeline.  This was a couple weeks ago and we haven't heard back
  from them yet.

  M16 was suggested as an ERO target by Tony and other SSC folks. The field they
  are interested in is mostly in our survey region.  Several subsequent emails
  have addressed the issues involved with this.

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