Teraminutes for meeting of Friday 2nd July 2004

Hardware problems:

 mix1/mix2 (Fred, Emmanuel). Mix1 is still very unstable: it does not on boot with all memory installed. Fred/Emmanuel have exchanged almost every component that it is possible to exchange between mix1 and mix2 (processors, memory, power supplies) but crashes still persist, and the machine still does not boot when all the memory is installed.

 However, mix1 is still under guarantee (delivered less than one year ago, on the 21st of July), so we should be able to get a replacement motherboard. Probably will take two weeks to get the replacement part. Option+ have received the order for the replacement raid card and cables for mix1/mix2: should be a few days before they are delivered.

Panier (Gerard):

Gerard is working to deliver the panier on Wednesday July 7 and dbclient2 Friday July 9.

Spica (Laurent)

 Some problems with astrometrix, in particular with the search radius for the USNO catalogue (not enough sources were being found because the default source radius was too small). Laurent is happy. Spica interface to astometrix demonstrated which makes a stack automatically using astrometric and photometric solutions computed by astrometrix. It also generates web-pages containing all the plots produced by astrometrix: the linear astrometric solution, the global astrometric solution and the photometric solution. Henry will communicate to Laurent and JC how the magnitudes of stars are measured and what parameters should be in the photometric catalogue.

Scamp (Emmanuel):

 The latest version of scamp was demonstrated which uses weighting based on the s/n of the sources. Plotting now shows high s/n sources in yellow.

 Discussion concerning relative merits of usno/a usno/b. Some sources in d3 have precise astrometry from Tycho: yannick will investigate if we can use this to make a comparison between usno/a and usno/b in this field. Unfortunately, a lot of development time is taken up by fixing plotting problems: it would be good to have a new graphics library, maybe a student could help us on this.

 Some discussion about the positional errors are computed in sextractor: it turns out that for faint sources, sextractor does not compute positional errors correctly.

Skywatcher (JC):

 Mode "fits" still under test, but seems to work and correctly displays the large fits images on the sky correctly. Web interface demonstrated, seems to work (can we add links to qualityfits pages for the generated image?).

Defectix (Anthony)

Documents are now online.

Data reductions (Mireille, Henry, Yannick).

It seems that there is an offset of 0.05 magnitu des in r* (at least, Yannick discovered that by adding 0.05 magnitudes to the r* data, all the colour-colour plots match up, using the W1 data processed by Mireille). Yannick has notified the CFH of this problem.

d1* ugriz reductions are finished.

Dougados data (Gilles): i* z* data should be ready by the end of next week.

Hardware status (b): Natalie Royer is suggesting that 12,000 eur of Polaris funds should be used to pay for air conditioning in the machine room. If so, we will not be able to buy the new FB bay for intou/ouput data JC and Laurent need.

Suggestion from Emmanuel: system of 'tickets' to keep track of pending issues, both related to hardware software issues.

Next meeting: Friday, July 9, 2004.