IPAC 2MASS Science and Analysis Working Group Meeting #1 Minutes

IPAC 2MASS Science and Analysis Working Group Meeting #1 Minutes, 9/06/95

Attendees: R. Cutri, L. Fullmer, T. Jarrett, D. Kirkpatrick, G. Laughlin, B. Light, C. Lonsdale, M. Moshir, S. Terebey

The purpose of this new working group meeting is to have an informal forum for an in-depth discussion of on-going 2MASS analysis and science issues. The group will meet weekly at 10am on Wednesdays in the large conference room. There will be no formal agenda; instead we will ask for status reports from people with active tasks, and will address the questions, problems, ideas, etc. that any group member wishes to raise. The idea is to keep everybody well educated about progress in all areas of 2MASS analysis and science, and to tap everyone's brains for creative ideas and solutions to problems.

At the kickoff meeting September 6th, we initiated the discussion by going round the table and asking for status reports on everyone's activities. Not all people present were reached by the end of the hour, therefore some reports were postponed till the next meeting.

M. Moshir: Mehrdad has begun work with H. McCallon on position reconstruction issues. He is working on the formulation of correctly assigning probabilities to the match scenarios which are used in the two-peg method.
L. Fullmer: is working with R. Cutri to clean up problems with galaxy extractions in Coma caused by the bright star mask.
R. Cutri: Roc reported for S. Wheelock since she had to miss the meeting. Sherry and Roc have been working on the photometric calibration, and have derived new airmass corrections for each night, following the recently completed photometric post-processing run. The curves are now much improved, though it seems that some standard stars have systematic offsets as large as 5-10%. Roc is in contact with the UKIRT standard star folks (via John Carpenter), who have acknowledged the presence of offsets this large, though they haven't informed us which stars are affected.
In addition to a band-by-band photometric calibration, Roc has been looking at the robustness of a color calibration. He finds a nice extinction curve for (J-Ks), but there is too little dynamic range in (H-Ks).
Roc also raised the question of benchmarking galaxy extractions using FOCAS, as requested by M. Strutski. We will use a single strip through Coma to do this task.
G. Laughlin: Announced her availability to help with some analysis tasks; she will take on the galaxy extraction verification task using FOCAS, working with Roc and Carol.