File contents

18th May 2004  Obs meeting room 10.00 - 12:50

Present:   JRL, PSB, MJI, DWE, WJS, STH, RGM

Agenda
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1.  Actions from last meeting
2.  Comments on WFAU minutes
3.  JAC telecons of 22nd April and 5th May
4.  VDMT meeting of 4th May
5.  VDUC meeting
6.  UKIDSS MSB design meeting & ESO public surveys
7.  ESO PDR
8.  Work package accounting
9.  AOB

Minutes
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1.  Actions from last meeting

STH  has made no progress regarding the spatial systematics in the UFTI 
     standards data and new test data. It was felt that this really should
     be finished off and bumped higher up STH's priority list. Ongoing.    <<<<

MJI  some progress (calibration) on comparison of FIRES project reduced 
     data with ours - but still ongoing                                    <<<<

STH  calibration of FIRES data has been carried out by MJI using 2MASS data.
     It was estimated that this was done to ~5% accuracy.

STH  Missing ISAAC files have been given to JRL.

JRL  have decided that the report on ISAAC reductions will be incorporated
MJI  within the SPIE presentation.

PSB  has emailed Nigel Hambly regarding the service level agreement that
     exists up in Edinburgh. His response was that there wasn't one and that
     they were "just trying to maximise uptime where we can at reasonable 
     cost."

MJI  has updated the milestones web page. RGM asked whether the old
     milestones web pages were archived since they could be useful for
     tracing work history.  MJI said the old versions hadn't been kept
     since this was essentially a tick list, but noted that the detail of 
     progress was already recorded in the monthly reports and gantt charts.

MJI  has drawn up an email notification list which is available from him
     and DWE for aspiring authors of reports.

MJI  over the next 2 days MJI will make a start on the SPIE presentation
JRL  paper and rope in JRL and STH to help draft relevant sections. 
STH  The deadline is 25th May - ongoing, until then.                       <<<<

PSB  wrote a shell document for the PDR RIXs and circulated it.

STH  altered the Q2 2004 task list to account for PSB's comments
MJI

JRL  has done further checks on the new WFCAM test data. He reported that 
     he has got some plausible results for a restricted range of linearity
     measurements. However, he warned that this may not be representative 
     of what we will get with the end setup since the readout mode, 
     illumination etc. will be different.

MJI  received more news on WFCAM status via the JAC telecons (see item 3).
JRL 

DWE  wrote a document explaining CASU's document numbering system.  There
     was some discussion on the merits and pitfalls of unique numbers (VPO) 
     -v- unique numbers+letters (CASU's).  There is a potential for 
     confusion if CASU deposit their (mainly) internal documents in the 
     VISTA sharepoint repository.  Since they are not intending to do this
     it was felt that this could be handled on a one-by-one basis eg. DID
     doc.


2.  Comments on WFAU minutes

There were no comments worth recording.


3.  JAC telecons of 22nd April and 5th May

JRL reported on the 2 telecons that have been held since the last CASU
meeting.

The news on the detector front is that the ATC have finished their 
metrology tests and didn't find anything wrong with their procedures.
The 'A' team is meeting (met) with Rockwell at the end of April.
Futher cold tests have been suspended until the results of the meeting
have been agreed.

The pre-shipping acceptance tests can be carried out on the engineering 
array.  JAC representatives will visit the ATC in June for this.
The slight hiatus in the schedule means a delay of ~3 weeks with shipping
of WFCAM now pencilled in ~1 month later. 

Meanwhile UKIRT have issued a call for further non-WFCAM proposals for 
July and August to fill the gap in the schedule.  This implies engineering 
commissioning on the telescope at the summit cannot now begin until  
September.  On-sky characterisation and the first science data are expected
1-2 months later.

In parallel with this, delivery of the corrector plate is slightly behind 
schedule.   However, this now seems close to the required tolerance specs
and may not impact on the acceptance, or WFCAM delivery, plans.

CASU have received a test SDF file from the ATC via JAC and have sent some 
comments back to the ATC via JAC.

MJI and JRL inquired how the calibration measurements for the non-linearity
correction were going to be made.  It is not possible to simultaneously
get both the reset frames and the reset-corrected frames.  Therefore the plan
is to fix the illumination level, use RR mode, do a reset-read
and get a 'bias' level reset frame and then reset-read with successively 
longer exposures to get the required observations.  Some issues with this
scheme were raised: it is a different readout mode; if a reset is done 
globally and a read is done by rows, then the exposure time depends on 
position!  This latter needs clarifying.  PH suspects lookup tables are 
required for the DAS, rather than polynomial coeffs.  He will check
with AV about this and also about the reset issue.

MJI and JRL also inquired about responsiblity for providing the focus 
estimation code.  This appears to be an ATC reponsibility.

The LTO transfer test went smoothly as soon as the LTO reappeared on PH's
desk and took 5 days from inception to reception in Cambridge.

The JAC-CASU milestones were reviewed, and subsequently updated on the web 
page.

MJI asked AA to check that the UKIRT board were aware of CASU and WFAU's
offer to provide short talks followed by Q and A session at the next 
UKIRT board meeting (see below)

The next JAC telecon will be on 28th May at 9pm - MJI's turn to provide 
the wine.


4.  VDMT meeting of 4th May

STH reported that the last VDMT meeting went smoothly. There was a request
regarding the monitoring of our progress and that we use earned value. The
detailed discussion of this point was left until item 8.

Final preparation arrangements for the ESO PDR were discussed. The answers
to the RIXs were progressing well, with no serious issues raised so far.

It was confirmed at the VDMT meeting that CASU and WFAU will give short
presentations at the next UKIRT board meeting to be held in Durham on the
24th/25th May.

The next VDMT meeting is on 7th June so monthly reports to STH by Friday
28th May please.                                                           <<<<


5.  VDUC meeting

MJI reported on the VDUC meeting held on 7th May in Cambridge. 
Apart from a few minor issues the meeting was very constructive and
established a precedure for reviewing the requirements on the pipeline
and archive for WFCAM and for setting up the same for the UK side of
the VDFS.  

Simon Dye (SD, Cardiff), the new Consortium Science Verifier introduced 
himself and described what he sees as his role.  He will be working closely 
with CASU assessing the science quality of the pipeline output.  In lieu of 
WFCAM data MJI and STH undertook to provide SD with access to the FIRES 
test commissioning data.                                                   <<<<

For more details see the provisional minutes, actions from the meeting and 
TOR which are on our internal/ web page directory.


6.  UKIDSS MSB design meeting & ESO public surveys

STH reported on this meeting held at Oxford on May 10th. The meeting started
with an update on WFCAM status.

The role of complementary optical surveys on the VST was discussed. 
The OmegaCam team are thought to be planning to survey large areas of sky
covered by UKIDSS surveys.  This presents an interesting conundrum since 
their data is private, while those of UKIDSS are public, putting the Dutch 
group at a significant advantage.  The ESO call for public surveys (deadline
October 2004) on the VST requires that interested parties guarantee to
process and make available to the community the survey data.  In light of 
this SJW had already asked at the VDUC meeting if CASU were interested in
being involved in processing VST data.  MJI said they were interested, 
but that this would require more manpower effort and hardware than is 
currently available and would therefore require bidding for further funding 
to do this.

The opinion regarding pipeline acceptance testing was to supply SD with
the FIRES data. STH and MJI will organize this.  SJW also wanted          
intermediate data products to be supplied as well.  Since this is
almost unlimited in scope given: the number of processing steps; not
all the intermeidate data products are kept; and that the raw data amounts 
to 30 Gbytes already, it was felt better to limit the intermediate products
to the individual OB outputs.  The UFTI data could be supplied later but 
this would probably need to be re-reduced since most of the products have 
long since vanished.                                                       

On-sky characterization was discussed at the meeting. It was pointed out 
that JAC already have a web page relating to this. RGM suggested that there 
should be a direct link from the WFCAM pages to this. He also mentioned 
that Paul Hirst's home page should also be linked directly. DWE and STH 
will look into this.                                                       <<<<

Since CASU needs to work closely to Simon Dye it was thought that it might
be a good idea for him to come out to Hawaii for the second half of the
on-sky commissioning.

The Survey Definition Tool (SDT) written by Martin Folger was given a
demonstration at Oxford. This generates the MSBs that are needed to be fed
into the Observing Tool (OT). CASU needs MSBs (or pseudocode) from the
UKIDSS survey heads in order to comment on them. It was agreed that these
would be supplied by the end of May.

SJW said that no survey scheduling simulator had been written and didn't 
look like it would be.  Related to this, Andy Adamson has just released a 
document on an operational model for WFCAM surveys and has requested 
comments.  All to read this document and supply comments to MJI for
forwarding.                                                                <<<<

STH said that the version of the Oxford minutes he had was a draft and that
he needed to comment on them.  There had already been a lot of discussion
on these minutes, for the incurably curious they are also in our internal/
web page directory.                                                        <<<<


7.  ESO PDR

MJI said that the ESO PDR for the VDFS deliverables (13 May, Garching) 
went very well and the feedback was very positive.  The agreed actions 
via the completed RIXs will be passed to CASU  after they have been 
filtered through Jim Emerson and Michelle Peron.

One of these actions will be to agree on a list of requirements for
CPL/QFITS.  JRL said that various header and data I/O issues exist in the
current implementation of QFITS and that he and PSB would produce a more 
comprehensive list of requirements.                                        <<<<

At the PDR, the Data Interface Document (DID) was agreed to be a version 
0.5 deliverable for FDR.  This is important since a lot of assumptions 
regarding driving the pipeline are encoded in the FITS headers, which
are the major part of this document.  One aspect of this is that PSB
needs an updated telescope FITS header description from JMS by the end
of July if we want to iterate the DID one more time before FDR.

The FDR for the ESO VDFS deliverables is scheduled to be mid-December, 
thus all the FDR documentation must completed by mid-November.

JRL and PSB would like to officially quash the rumour that they had too
many beers after the PDR and would like to know the source of this 
malicious gossip ...... hic!


8.  Work package accounting

STH said that there was a request from the VDMT to change the way that we
monitor progress with the work packages.  JMS would like CASU to use 
an earned value metric. The granularity we have agreed to use will be at 
the level of the work package units.  This accounting needs to be 
done every quarter. The unit of each datum will still be FTE.  As a test, 
using this method of earned value accounting for the previous year has 
shown that we are only 10% behind the schedule drawn up 18 months ago.


9.  AOB

MJI reported that various people have visited the APM building to check up
on things that need doing for the alterations (roof and electrical).

The planning notice has gone up (dated 23 April) and we had 2 weeks to object.
Paul Aslin is organizing another meeting for next week with the architects
and Estate Management.  The schedule is still targetting a December finish.

STH said that there would be a DAC meeting an 28 May.  MJI and STH thought
it would be useful to know how much grant-line money CASU has brought into 
the IoA and University  since CASU's inception in 1998.  MJI said that he 
would ask Paul Aslin for these figures and pass them on to STH.            <<<<

PSB raised the issue of upgrading the facilities in the Observatories
Meeting Room. The items needed would be laptop projector, wireless
networking, ventilation/air conditioning and a bigger/different table(s). 
This request should be passed on to the DAC.  STH said that this would need 
approximate costing before the meeting to circumvent obfuscation.          <<<<


Continuing Actions
------------------

STH  finish looking at the spatial systematics in the UFTI standards data and
     new test data. This needs to be bumped up the STH priority list!

MJI  compare FIRES project reduced data with ours

MJI  write paper for SPIE Glasgow (deadline 24th May)
JRL
STH

New Actions
-----------

ALL  send monthly reports to STH by Friday 28th May                       

STH  to organize sending the FIRES data to Simon Dye (as soon as possible). 
MJI

DWE  add links to JAC on-sky characterization web page.  Also Paul Hirst's
STH  home page and anything else that might be directly relevant

ALL  look at Andy Adamson's WFCAM Survey Operations web page and provide
     comments to MJI for forwarding

STH  send in comments on Oxford meeting minutes 

JRL  draw up a more detailed list of the functionality required in 
PSB  CPL/QFITS

MJI  provide figures from Paul Aslin on the CASU grant-line since 1998

STH  provide costings for upgrade of Observatories Meeting Room facilities 
PSB  and present at DAC.