[News] OAC activity for the 2d half of 2004
Roberto Silvotti
silvotti at na.astro.it
Wed Jul 7 18:58:57 CEST 2004
Dear astro-wisers,
In the coming two quarters of 2004, the main 3 items of OAC
activity will be:
I) Variability tool.
After a few internal discussions at the beginning of this year,
it was clear that the local community was much more interested to
have a tool for image subtraction, which could be used for different
projects in different time-scale domains.
Hence we started a phase of tests on two independent existing
packages, both based on the Alard (1999, A&A 343, 10) method.
The two packages are: ISIS (Alard) and ISS (Wozniak), both are free.
After some tests on WFI images, we decided for the second one, which
is better written and has more documentation.
Therefeore, we defined to modify the software of Wozniak, in order
to improve a few items that were not satisfactory for our purposes,
and in order to render it compatible with the AW platform.
1) Implement masks on each single image.
2) Define different classes of variables.
3) WCS: move from x,y to AR,DEC
4) Improve selection of objects for PSF construction.
5) Absolute photometry and relative amplitudes (??).
6) Times from headers.
7) Stamps of variable candidates.
8) Parallelization.
9) Python interface and AW compatibility.
Currently items 1), 4) and 7) were done and Alfredo is working
on item 3).
Schedule: we plan to have a preliminary version of the modified
software
by the end of 3d quarter
II) QC.
OAC is participating in the second phase of QC of calibration frames
(BIAS, FF and fringing).
Concerning BIAS and FF, the goal is to define how to apply the tools
written last year, which are already in the pipeline but not used yet.
Concerning fringing QC, we are currently making tests and we just
made a very preliminary proposal on how to vertify the quality of
the fringing correction. The next step, after some discussions with
the partners, will be to write the code for fringing QC.
Moreover OAC participates also on the other three groups on QC:
- Astrometry;
- Photometric calibration;
- Overall pipeline.
III) Pipeline validation.
The report written by us recently on the first validation of the
AW pipeline
has revealed a few problems and produced some discussions on how
to solve these problems and how to improve the output products.
After this phase will be concluded and these problems solved, we plan
to continue with a second series of tests, applying the AW pipeline in
the case of
more critical situations (e.g. very poor vs very crowded fields,
variable background fields, etc. ...) in order to check how the
pipeline
behaves in critical conditions.
Kind regards,
Roberto
----------------------------------------
Dr. Roberto Silvotti
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INAF (Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica)
Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
via Moiariello 16, I-80131 Napoli, Italy
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tel/fax: +39-081-5575583/456710
e-mail: silvotti at na.astro.it
web: http://www.na.astro.it/~silvotti
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