Teraminutes of December 4th 2006

Present: Chiara, Yannick, Emmanuel, Fred, Laurent, Mireille, Mathias (video)

Absent: Henry, Anthony.

Emmanuel's summary document

Purchases

 All the orders have been passed, and some have even arrived (USB keys for instance). The extra 200 euros have been spent buying a portable printer for stickers. Fred will update the Intranet pages. The two big machines (file servers) will not be delivered before January. One will be filled with 750GB disks while the other one will stay empty (wiating for a decrease of HD prices).

T0004

 Laurent has transfered all the T03 QFITSouts and meta-data to ftpix:/data/raid/spica/T03/. But some metadata have been generated only at the end of the T03 processing.
 TERAPIX members should play with the interface to check that everything is in order among the previous Deep, Wide and Very Wide survey releases and that there are no broken links. Yannick will check before authorizing the official release online on Wednesday 6.
 Laurent has started trying to combine T02 and T03 data as a check for T04 operations.
 Fred will start downloading the missing 2000+ images from CADC. It must be finished on Thursday at the latest.
 Laurent will try to launch QFITSin on Friday evening (depending on the time it takes to clean everything and prepare the database).
 Yannick will start grading the data on Saturday 9.
 The replication of mix8 has started on mix1 and mix2.

W1-u "Willott"

 Laurent transfers to ftpix the W1-u "Willott" data. Fred/Laurent will create a special "CFHTLS-W1u" directory on ftpix as for a regular PI program. Yannick will send a mail to J.J. Kavalaars to prevent any political difficulties.

Mix9 SWarping problems

 Fred has simulated the effects of the 03:01am cronjobs this afternoon by starting the different tasks involved one by one while SWarp was going on. Some features are reproduced, like the jump in memory used for buffers, but no consequence is noticed.

Software developments

 Fred will try to implement the T03 counts in QualityFITS and identify/correct the sub-image bugs for Friday 8. But the QFITSin will be started even if it is not done in time.
 Laurent has not yet added support for VOTables in SPICA. It must be done when the QFITSin are finished.
 The new MissFITS will be released by Chiara before the end of 2006. It is currently being documented.
 Emmanuel will provide a fixed version of SCAMP this week.

Web

 Henry has published the FAQs. Yannick suggests to send all future propositions of FAQs to Henry.
 Chiara will help Mireille filling out the PI tables in SPIP this week.

Finances and politics
 The "IE CDD" position is opened immediately as a backup until the full IE position be opened again and filled. The call has been prepared by Yannick and reviewed/accepted by Nicole Blondin and the Universite Paris 6, prior to publication. It has been published tonight on the TERAPIX pages and will be posted soon on the IAP page "poste a pourvoir".
 The amount of money sought by Yannick for 2007 is of the order of 30 to 45kEURO. The effort necessary for WIRCAM has been taken into account. The amount allocated will be known in the coming weeks.
 Participation to LSST: a joint IN2P3/INSU letter of interest has been prepared by APC, LPNHE, CPPM, LAL, LAM, Cassioppe and IAP and will be sent to LSST Board this week. German institutes already sent their letter and a letter from UK should be sent soon (though not yet confrimed). The LSST Board will consider these letter by the end of the week. The IAP letter contains Terapix and Planck since the project is expected to start (first light) by 2014. The letter from the French laboratories is not yet in final shape and is now in the hands of Pierre Binetruy. We expect everything to be set tonight.
 Yannick has asked some board members (Catala, Cuby) to raise the question of the WIRCAM understaffing at CFHT during their next meeting.
 Follow-ups for RTRA are expected from Henry.

WIRCAM

 Herve will report on his work on COSMOS photometry before the end of the week.

misc

 Mathias is working with Nicolas Regnault from SNLS to improve our knowledge of the MEGACAM transmission curves. Some differences are found with previous curves. Expect new synthetic colour tracks for mid-December. It might be possible to conduct the same kind of work for WIRCAM using 2MASS stars.
 SCAMP 1.3.2 improves over previous versions for the astrometry of Annie Robin's fields, but some problems remain. Mireille will work with Emmanuel to track down possible bugs or issues with specific exposures.
 Henry should contact the CFH people to understand their flux conservation strategy and the consequences for SWarp.
 The whole campus is expected to switch to a gigabit connection in the coming weeks.

Next meeting: Friday 15 December 2006 (updated Dec. 7, 2006)