Attached : outlines of Papers 2 and 3
WFCAM works. The pipeline and archive systems are successfully processing commissioning data, and the first UKIDSS observations are scheduled - see the UKIRT web pages. For more detail see the latest UKIRT newsletter, which has updates on commissioning, pipeline, and archive. See also the WFCAM "stop-press" for the absolute latest info on the instrument.
The latest news reports a 2-week delay, for shimming out final alignment residuals. We should hear soon how this will impact the initial stages of the UKIDSS schedule.
Finally it is worth noting that the VISTA Data Users Committee (VDUC) met recently under the chairmanship of Tim Naylor. As well as commenting on progress on the WFCAM pipeline and WSA, which are of course the precursors of the VISTA systems, they had a short written report from Steve Warren and Simon Dye on their initial analysis of WFCAM data quality. Steve will put a revised version shortly on the UKIDSS web page.
The first few UKIDSS observations, some 10 hours per survey, will be devoted to MSBs labeled for science verification. These will have priority for processing, to enable the working groups to analyse the pipeline+archive products, and provide feedback to CASU and WFAU. The idea is for the working groups to do dummy science (the area/depth are tiny compared to our survey goals) with the data, to highlight any quirks or shortcomings of the pipeline and archive. If you wish to volunteer to work on these data please contact Steve Warren. There will be a meeting at Imperial College on 1 April for people working on the SV data to debate plans. In parallel with this effort it is intended that there will be a certain amount of data reduction 'by hand' to compare against the pipeline products, and the contents of the archive. There isn't yet a clear picture of the timescale for the first release of a significant amount of data to the ESO community. Everyone is aware that it would be highly desirable for this to occur in time for the Autumn round of telescope proposals.
(condensed version of the February message)
For data that are not yet world-public, access will be through a username/password system. All astronomers who work at institutions within ESO member states, plus those individual Japanese astronomers who are members of the UKIDSS consortium, can register for a username and password. The production of authorised names is devolved to "communities", by which we mean something like a department, organisation, or distinct group of astronomers like "Japanese UKIDSS members" or "the commissioning team".
A UKIDSS registration team of Steve Warren, Andy Lawrence, Andy Adamson, and Nigel Hambly will agree a list of trusted "community contacts". Those individuals will then draw up a list of people within their community that they wish to register for access, choosing their usernames and passwords. (To guarantee uniqueness, the community name will be part of the username - e.g. jac.andya etc). The community contacts then provide their lists to the WSA team who ingest them into the database. Every so often, as people leave and join institutions, the community contacts can update their lists - it is up to them when to do this. New communities can also apply to join.
The initial list of community contacts can be found on the archive page. We have already received some suggestions for changes, but do feel free to suggest more. A short article is appearing in the ESO Messenger alerting the ESO community in general, from which there may be suggestions for new WSA-communities. When this is done, we will issue instructions to the community contacts for how to upload their user lists.
Registration Team :
Its time to put some papers out. This newsletter section is to remind the consortium of the plan, to show people the first paper outlines, and to offer the opportunity for anybody who believes they should be an author of one of these papers to say so.
The consortium has no special data rights, and likewise no ownership of any specific areas of science analysis. We create the survey but then it is free for all. Nonetheless the consortium can be the springboard for forming teams to attack particular areas by mutual consent, whilst not constraining any other free market teams. We discussed this idea at the November 2003 consortium meeting but have not yet taken it forward. We should have a consortium meeting in a few months when there is enough data to excite us, and start from there. This will probably be in Edinburgh - watch this space.
In November 2003 we discussed and rejected the idea of an extensive series of technical papers. The consortium gets its reward by doing science as quickly as possible. Instead we came up with a fairly short list of papers, most of which are WFCAM papers, rather than UKIDSS papers per se. They do however form a basic UKIDSS reference set. The suggestion is that they should all cross refer to each other and contain some common agreed phrases. They are not a numbered series, as they are mostly not UKIDSS papers per se, but we can refer to them by number internally for conveniemce.
Paper 2 may have a follow-on paper describing the on-sky calibration found, and colour equations. Later, one could imagine reference papers for each individual survey, with data quality statistics - photometric and astrometric accuracy, summary statistics, etc. But we can sort all that out later.
Papers 1,4, and 5 are not strictly UKIDSS papers and so the authorship is up to the lead author concerned. Paper 2 is a UKIDSS paper but will be limited to the people who did that specific piece of work. Paper 3 could potentially have the whole UKIDSS consortium as authorship. In November 2003 we rejected this idea and suggested instead that it should be only CPI, CSS, and Survey Heads. However, we also felt that we should add some individuals who have clearly contributed in a particularly significant way to the definition of the surveys or the taking forward of UKIDSS more generally. The most obvious person to add is Andy Adamson.
If you feel you should be an author on Paper 3, send an email to Andy Lawrence
Likewise, if you feel should be an author of one of the other papers, contact the lead author.
Steve and Andy agreed some common text for papers 2 and 3, and would like authors of later UKIDSS-related papers to use similar text. We have also suggested this common text to the authors of papers 1,4, and 5, but thats up to them.
"The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS, Lawrence et al., 2005) commences in Spring 2005, and is a set of five surveys of complementary combinations of depth and area, covering the wavelength range 0.83-2.37mu in five filters ZYJHK, and covering regions of the sky at both high and low Galactic latitude. This paper is one of a set of five (Casali et al., 2005, Lawrence et al., 2005, this paper, Irwin et al., 2005, Hambly et al., 2005), described below, which provide the reference technical documentation for UKIDSS."
We have a science verification meeting on Friday, and a plan for some kind of workshop in the autumn. But perhaps its time for another full consortium meeting ? Suggestions please.