Minutes for Telecon for Dec 18, 2002 Present: Benjamin, Meade, Stolovy, Dickey, Indebetouw, Babler, Clemens, Mathis, Whitney, Wolff, Ashman Next telecon: Wednesday January 15, 2003, 11 am CST, 608-265-1000 #4112 Launch slip's impact on SSC schedule and implications for GLIMPSE: (post-BCD software status/schedule, AOR modification periods, etc) Tony was out of town so Susan gave us an update. April 15 is looking reasonable for a launch date. There is only a 3 week launch window around this time...if it slips past this window, it slips a lot. New AOR's for the April 15, 2003 launch date are due Feb 14, 2003. A new version of SPOT will be released in January. We are interested in SSC's plans for bandmerger development. Susan will check into that for us. (New) Science Verification Target: Team Here are some possible southern SV targets: target l b window RCW 53 287.4 -0.6 May 8 - Aug 5 *RCW 57 291.6 -0.6 May 18 - Aug 14 G305.2+0.2 305.2 +0.2 Jun 23 - Aug 29 G327.3-0.6 327.3 -0.6 July 29 - Sept 17 *G333.6-0.2 333.6 -0.2 Aug 4 - Sept 20 G338.4+0.0 338.4 +0.0 Aug 8 - Sept 23 *NGC 6334 351.3 +0.6 Aug 18 - Sept 23 Remy generated some images of these objects at http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~remy/g/SV.html We would like a good range of brightness, diffuse bkgs and source density for our Science Verification region. Ed mentioned previously he liked RCW57 the best but it's in the ROC. Remy and Barb are concerned that it is in a region of low stellar density. Ed thinks the star formation region will be high. Remy will check in SPOT to see what kind of observation is planned for RCW57. The BU folks like NGC6334 because of the science potential--it's very well-studied. It is very bright with lots of diffuse emission, perhaps too much of a challenge? It's not available until Aug 18 though. Susan said SV will probably start at L+95 days... if everything goes well. That's towards the end of July 2003. IRAC time will probably be scheduled early in the SV time so we may be taking our SV obs early in the SV timeframe. Barb likes G333.6 because it intersects a spiral arm and therefore has high stellar density. John D. recommends the l=320-333 region as an area of great scientific interest which they've been studying. We should get the 2MASS data for these regions. Only the Quicklook images are publicly available for that part of the sky. Can we get some of the Atlas images (these are photometric) through back channels? Another thing to note is that neither RCW57 nor NGC6334 are in our survey region. The consensus was to focus on RCW 57, G333.6-0.2 and NGC 6334 and we should check with the SSC to make sure we would be given the OK to observe RCW57 or NGC6334. Status of ongoing projects: Pipeline general: Remy Mosaicing has been added to the pipeline. And there is database interaction with the point source lists. mosaicing: Barb Barb has been learning the art of mosaicing the 2MASS images using Montage. The quicklook images are not photometric and so bkg matching doesn't work very well. It's best to use the Atlas images. The 2MASS Atlas images are only available from their 2nd Incremental Release and cover a small part of the northern hemisphere and none from the southern region. It's not likely the All-Sky Survey Atlas images will be released before the SIRTF launch. On the other hand, their gallery page shows many atlas images not in their 2nd incremental release. It sure would be nice if we could get access to these images... database issues: Mike The SDSS spatial indexing algorithm doesn't seem to work. Oracle has a built-in spatial indexing and Mike is looking into that. Getting images into the database... deleting items in the database has to be worked out. QLVT integration: Marilyn Marilyn has put together a dataset for Mark to use to test QLVT functions and interactions. It's a 4 x 20 AOR of our W51 simulated data. 2 of the frames have been corrupted to test the LevelA checks. Barb has been working on mosaicing the 2MASS Atlas images in the W51 area so we can then tile them into smaller pieces for use in the QLVT. Photometry of mosaiced images: Brian Brian has been working on how to compute proper errors with DAOPHOT using the mosaiced images. He is finding many more stars in the mosaic data than the sqrt(2) improvement one would have expected. That may be because we're resampling to smaller pixels. The mosaic images smooth the noise and enhance the objects. He hasn't tested to see if the photometry is okay but it is on his to-do list. Lots more to study and test. C+R: Remy Remy, Ed, Barb & Brian talked to a statistician at the UW. He suggested we do the calculations more rigorously. We were assuming 6 out of 10 detections was truth but it may not be. We need to calibrate this with the truth image. It may be 6 or 7 or 5?? out of 10. Remy & Christer will work on this. Student hiring at other sites: BU, UWyo, UMD, UM (when, expected duties, possibility of time spent in Madison) Dan says they plan to have 2 students for the summer and hope to keep one student after that. They want to get them started with 2MASS data, to correlate it with GRS data. They may be able to help with QLVT duty, but that could prove impractical. They prefer the students to do science-related things. John D says they have a couple students working on galactic plane data. They could be candidates to help out. UW - Question: Are we (UW) hiring any more students or getting more grad students? Christer is half-time GLIMPSE. REU students - Bob says for next summer (2003) the REU program will be done by the time we get GLIMPSE data but they could work on complementary data. PASP Paper: Bob Dan suggested several substantial improvements that Bob is working on. Bob needs figures from Dan (comparing IRAC instrument characteristics to other surveys) and Barb (a GLIMPSE overview-similar to what is on the GLIMPSE home page) Bob will send out a new version soon. We need to get him comments ASAP. The manuscript needs to be submitted to PASP by Dec 30. Misc. Summer meeting - Dan The BU folks encourage the Wisconsin folks and all GLIMPSErs to attend the meeting! There is a link to the meeting web site on the GLIMPSE home page. Early registration is now through April 30, 2003. AAS meeting in January Bob, Jim, Remy, BU post doc Ronak Shah, others? are going to the meeting. Team meeting in Madison? We'd like to have a team meeting in Madison sometime. Are there $$ in the budget for this? A main focus should be science, which gets lost in the nuts and bolts of getting ready for the data onslaught.