Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 14:55:53 -0800 (PST)
To: 2mass-staff
Subject: IPAC 2MASS WG Meeting #178 Minutes
Cc: chas, stiening, bgreen, skrutski@north.phast.umass.edu
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           IPAC 2MASS Working Group Meeting #178 Minutes
                             1/19/99

Attendees: R. Cutri, S. Van Dyk, D. Kirkpatrick, B. Nelson, T. Evans,
           R. Tam, H. McCallon, D. Engler,  J. White, W. Wheaton, 
           L. Fullmer, R. Beck, G. Kopan, R. Hurt, J. Fowler, S. Wheelock,
           J. Mazzarella, T. Jarrett, J. Rho

          
AGENDA

1.) Project Update

2.) New and Standing Action Items

DISCUSSION

1.) Project Update

     R. Stiening was at the southern facility, performing miscellaneous
maintenance.  A focus test was done last night, with the zero-point dead-on.
An adjustment was made to the electronics to accept the Leach electronics for
the next maintenance run.  Data from last night look nominal.

     Discussions of Spring release and catalog generation criteria continue via
Tuesday morning telecons with UMass.

     A problem still exists with space at IPAC.  Even with the upcoming SSC
relocation to Spaulding, 33 people still need a place to work.  More people will
be relocated to MJ House as a result.  It's not clear yet how this will affect
2MASS, although R. Cutri has presented the argument to management that 2MASS
needs to be located in close proximity to the cluster of pipeline machines.

     A big task ahead is the inception of the database reload.  If team members
have something that needs to go into the database, they are advised to contact
T. Evans right away, since the reload will occur no later than this coming
Monday.  This will be a three to four week endeavor.  No longer will there be
separate northern and southern databases; the two hemispheres will be merged
within a single database.  DBMAPCOR changes are on hold until the end of the
database reload.

     Sometime this week or next, a first cut will be made on the Spring release
working database.  There are no signal-to-noise thresholds as yet.  Something
smaller will be produced on which to run tests.  The working database will 
consist of about 20 million rows or more.

     Northern PSFs are now in the pipeline for the Jun-Aug period.  W. Wheaton 
is satisfied with the results.

     G. Kopan briefly discussed recent improvements to PIXPHOT.  It is now less
sensitive to OH airglow, but more sensitive to confusion noise (up to 50%).
The question arose as to whether crowded fields can be run through the pipeline
for analysis, and the decision was that it wouldn't hurt to do this.

     J. Rho and T. Jarrett presented the status of the "seetracker" scoring for
QA.  There is now a continuum of quality scoring.  The scoring infrastructure is
now in place, but parameter space still needs exploring.  The quality function
will be steep.  Only a small spatial area will have scores less than 1.  J. Rho
would like to discuss the scoring more with T. Chester.  R. Cutri would like a
comfortable place to be reached where a zeroth implementation could be invoked
and tweaked later.  He urged that J. Rho and T. Jarrett work with the QA 
scientists to see this implemented.

     No Science Team meetings have been scheduled for the foreseeable future.
The institution of the telecons has deferred the need for meetings.  There, of
course, is a semi-infinite supply of work to get the Spring release ready.

     Finally, R. Tam gave a progress report on the classification of extended
sources on one night.  There were several thousand such sources that he 
inspected, resulting in tons of very red things.  Such objects are obviously
not all that rare.  Most of the objects inspected were small.
     
2.) New and Standing Action Items

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%                 ACTION ITEMS                         %
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(Standing Action Items:)

a) Team members should continue to analyze data for Spring data release.  
Members will likely be called upon to assist in steps toward catalog generation
for the release.