Re: A reminder + about prop. time

[David Schade <David.Schade@hia.nrc.ca>]

Christan,

 We had a meeting discussing these issues and others related to MegaCam Surveys
at HIA yesterday. I plan a meeting at UVIC before the Paris meeting. Making
progress.

  Regards,
    David

Christian Veillet wrote:

> Bonne et heureuse annee 2001!
>
> As you know, we have a lot of work ahead in the MSWG. I hope we
> will be able to converge to a proposal able to get the adhesion of a
> large part of the community interested in MegaCam in our three
> "countries"...
>
> A reminder: We meet in Paris on January 22, 23 and 24. Meeting will
> take place at the Paris site of the Observatoire de Paris. Exact
> location of the meeting room and time of the beginning of the
> meeting will be given later. CFHT will reimburse your expenses
> as usual.
>
> Among the various points we will have to address, we find the
> "proprietary time" issue. I would like to use this first email of
> the year to state a a couple of points for those of you who are not
> too familiar with the way CFHT deals with prop time:
>
> - The prop time of the images is by default one year after the
> date of the exposure. It has been 2 years for a long time though.
> It's why we start seeing CFH12K data on the CFHT archive web site.
> Many images have been already downloaded...
>
> - A PI can ask for a longer prop. time. However, there is no clear
> procedure established to study that. Seen from CFHT, we guess that,
> if a program is accepted by a TAC, the request for a change of prop.
> time (if any) is accepted at the same time. We have currently a very
> few programs going on with this restriction. CFHT doesn't say a
> word on that, and, from what I saw these past 18 months, the SAC
> doesn't either.
>
> Now, what should we do with the CFHLS (or the MegaCam surveys)? There
> are pros and cons to any solution we will adopt. We could
> 1- let the data open right away to the whole world
> 2- let the data open right away to the CFH communities (or any
> combination of CFH based on which agency is participating into the
> survey) and keep the prop time to one year (the current default)
> 3- do as in 2 for the communities involved, but have a release schedule
> tuned to the amount of data needed for nicely achieving the various
> scientific goals.
> 4- do as in 2 for the communities, but release the data to the whole
> world one year after the end of the CFHLS.
>
> 1 and 4 are very easy to implement.
> 1 won't please the agencies nor those who spent a lot of energy to make all
> of that happening.
> 1 and 2 bring a poor protection to the communities, as there is no guarantee
> that the first important scientific results will come from the CFH
> communities.
>
> If I want to be realistic,I would myself favor 4, though it means work to
> be done in order to establish a schedule which makes sense to most of the
> involved people.
>
> In any case, as the data on the fields observed (position, filter, integration
> time) will be public, I would insure the possibility of image retrieval on a
> case by case basis for non survey related programs (pre-discovery images of
> moving objects is an example, but there are many others).
>
> OK... more soon!
>
> Aloha
>
> Christian
>
> --
> ************************************************************
> Dr. Christian Veillet,       CFHT Senior Resident Astronomer
> Phone: (808) 885-3161   http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/~veillet/
> ************************************************************