Minutes for Telecon for Aug 06, 2002

Present: Benjamin, Meade, Indebetouw, Stolovy,
Babler, Clemens, Mathis, Dickey, Watson, Ashman

Next telecon: Tuesday Aug 20, 2002, 11 am CDT, 608-265-1000 #4112


I. Report of LSWG telecon 29 July 2002 (EBC)

  A. Contract status (Soifer and Bicay)
     Bottom line: All SIRTF projects will receive about a 13.7%
     reduction, starting October 2002! This is imposed by NASA Hdqr.
     Soifer's strategy will be to share the pain almost equally.
     Ed will get the official letter with the real numbers later this month. 
     This reduction applies to Oct '02 -- Sept '03. 
     Soifer plans to increase '04 budget to make up for the difference.
     The Science Workshop next summer is not in jeopardy.  BU folks
     will dig up some funding. Will probably need to reduce travel, some hardware
     and some $$ in salaries. 

  B. Noise source in IRAC (discussed before)
     Affects 5-10% of the pixels.  Can we put this in our simulations?

  C. 9 Jan '03 still the official launch date, even with budget
     reduction.

  D. Project planning and testing: it seems that all of our AORs are, in
     fact, OK. This is in regards to the uplink volume issue that came 
     up a few weeks ago which has been determined not to be a problem
     after all.

  E. Coordinated Legacy Science papers for PASP 
     (GLIMPSE papers spearheaded by Bob Benjamin, who needs input from
     the rest of us).  Input to PASP by November.  Can use our summary document
     and science requirements document as a start.

II. Soifer's response to Ed's letter several weeks ago (EBC)
    We were not aware of Soifer's wish for a 99.5% Reliability catalog.
    Soifer is comfortable with us producing a database and they will
    "service" it. There will be a telecon with SSC in October.  We need
    some hard numbers then, minimum fluxes, etc, with simulations.
    They will expect justification of our 2 pass strategy. 

III. New results regarding:

   A. Simulations (bandmerger) .... Remy
      Bandmerger is working.  Gave it 2 truth lists.  Positional inaccuracy
      will be an artificial source of incompleteness. It starts missing sources
      down to 11th or 12th magnitude, a couple of magnitudes above our confusion
      limit.

      Susan will send new information on BCD headers.  Position refinement
      info will be in the BCD header.

   B. Source extraction............ Brian
      Brian has continued to tweak and improve DAOPHOT.  He has PSFs for
      all 4 bands.  New scripts are being tested. 

IV. Science

   A. Arecibo Observations ........ Christer
      Ed & Christer had 6 days of observing at Arecibo. Observing UC HII regions
      to determine kinematic distances. Have recombination lines of 45 sources.
      formaldehyde.  The paper is being worked on.

   B. Report of W51 WIYN spectra .. Bob
      Our REU summer student Travis Lawrence obtained WIYN spectra for 250 stars
      in the W51 region. The data have been reduced and classified.
      A web page will be put together.  There are J,H,K colors from 2MASS and
      K band spectroscopy for ~80 sources...from a Japanese paper.
      Got 2-3 A0 stars to possibly give Martin for calibrators.
      Want to submit a paper before we start getting GLIMPSE data, if possible.

   C. How are calibrations going?
      SSC calibrations are done once per campaign, so approximately once per week.

V. Other

   Chip got a faculty job at Wyoming starting this fall.