GLIMPSE Team Meeting: April 06-07, 2003 by Ed Churchwell Dear Team, First, thanks to everyone who was able to attend the GLIMPSE team meeting on the 6th & 7th of this month. I believe the meeting was successful in that we were able to demonstrate a working pipeline that, to the extent possible with simulated data, can deal with most of the problems we are able to anticipate. We are not there yet but the remaining things to do are understood and should not present any major difficulty to implement. I believe we are on schedule and will be able to process the OSV and GLIMPSE survey data by the time we are scheduled. We have Remy, Barb, Marilyn, Brian, Mark, and Mike to thank for a Herculean effort on development of the pipeline. Remy and Christer have put in an enormous amount of time calculating reliability and completeness as a function of point source flux density based on simulated data. The bottom line seems to be that we can achieve the 99.5% reliability in all but the most crowded regions of the MW down to about 1 mJy in bands 1, 2, and 3. Band 4 is still a problem and the flux limit is likely to be higher in this band. The plan is to try to understand the few questions that were not obvious at the meeting including the issues with Band 4 and lay this issue to rest until we get OSV data to test with actual data. I sent Omont an email on Monday following our meeting telling him that we enthusiastically support the SIRGAL project and would be glad to be a collaborator in this program under the following conditions: 1) the data are processed with our pipeline at Madison 2) the proposal is submitted at the 2nd GO cycle 3) the GLIMPSE team would have to have support for 1-1.5 FTEs, an additional 4 processors and a RAID array for data storage, plus some support for analysis 4) data should be released to the public on a schedule similar to that of the GLIMPSE survey 5) the GLIMPSE team would expect to collaborate with members of the SIRGAL consortium on scientific research projects from the SIRGAL survey. I have not yet gotten a response from Omont. We also decided to table a 24 µm proposal and possibly reconsider it for the 2nd GO cycle. Our discussions on Monday (7th) on science with GLIMPSE data were fruitful but time limitations prevented us from getting very deeply into any topic. Jim Jackson discussed a method of automatically identifying extended objects using median filters with careful selection of kernel sizes. This looks very promising and we will explore this method further for IRAC images. If it works as well as it does for the GRS data, we will insert it into the pipeline in the coming weeks. Numerous large scale and long-term projects using GLIMPSE data were discussed and it is clear that there will be more than enough opportunities for all of us to do first-author publications in essentially any area of particular interest to each individual. Post docs, grad students, and those who are on soft money should be given as much opportunity as possible to get first author publications out early and often. GLIMPSE will provide enough data for post docs, grad students, and soft money scientists on our team to make a strong impact on their chosen area(s) and position them to effectively compete for the best jobs (Remy, Christer, and Emily) and/or federal grants (Barb, Mark, Mike, and Bob who are on soft money). Also Marilyn, Brian and others who will be doing day-to-day nursing of data through the pipeline should be included in the list of authors on papers produced by team members since their jobs are essential to any science that comes out of our efforts. These are mostly my own thoughts on this subject and its quite possible that not everyone agrees with my point of view on authorship. If anyone would like for us to discuss issues of authorship further in a future telecon, I would be glad to put it on the agenda. If I don't hear from any of you on this issue, I will assume that there is general agreement on authorship and we will not discuss it further. I think the general principle for first authorship should be that the person who pushes the project through and does most of the work, including writing, should be first author. Obviously, if a small group works on a project, they should agree among themselves who the first author is or will be based on the main contributor. In principle, the best image we will obtain will be the OSV source. Because of this, we spent some time discussing some possible early science from these data. A few possible papers that should/could come out of these data and folks who are interested in working on them are listed below. 1) A mosaiked 4-color image with a description of identified objects and comparisons with 2MASS, radio, X-ray, ionizing stars, etc. This would certainly be one of the papers for the special Ap.J. Lett. Issue. This would be a team effort lead by me. 2) MIR dark clouds in the imaged region. (Remy, Jim, Christer, Barb, Ed) a. Density structure with radius b. Identification of prestellar cores c. Support mechanisms d. Etc. 3) Diffuse MIR/NIR emission/absorption regions (Remy, Fabian, Alex) a. Turbulent structure b. PAH emission distribution relative to the stellar and molecular distributions (Mark, John?) 4) Stellar census analysis (Barb, Bob, Remy, Chip) a. CCD, CMD, SED analyses 5) Analysis of any clusters in the FOV (Dan, Barb, Remy, Ed) 6) Large scale analysis of the energetics of the HII emission (Tom, Mark, Ed, Bob) a. Analysis of radio cont. (NLyc),), CO (associated neutral medium) and HI associated with the molecular cloud b. NLyc vs ionizing stars (hopefully identifiable in IR) c. Distance from HI absorption of HII emission, if possible 7) Extinction analysis if feasible (John, Mike, Barb) a. Identification of stars of known spectral type and MIR colors with significant extinction 1-8 µm. 8) Stars with large IR excesses (Barb, Dan, Jim, Mark, Remy) a. Identification of potential protostars b. Analysis of SEDs, 9) UC HII regions if present (Ed, Barb, Remy, Dan?, Jim?, Tom?) 10) WR stars if present (Tony) 11) WDs and/or brown dwarfs (Sara, anyone else?) 12) Serendipity- all of us (especially Tom) The above list is by no means exhaustive. Tom, you may want to add your name to some of the topics. As we look at the data, other ideas will become apparent and presumably some of us will be interested in pursuing them. However, this list with attached names are areas that each group should start thinking about and planning how to do the necessary analyses well in advance because we will be in competition with the entire astronomical community. Data from our pipeline is only likely to appear 2-3 months after we release them to SSC (according to Tony), but as I understand it the BCD data will be public essentially when it is released to us. Thus, in principle, people could do a wide range of scientific cream skimming using BCD data immediately while we are busy processing the data further. We might be able to do a better job, but miss out on announcement of the major scientific discoveries if we are not well prepared and looking at the data from the time it is first released.