2023-02-08 TSO WG Meeting notes

1. News & announcements

want to have a monitor of the upcoming programs with teh instruments for JWST. would give us a clearer view on what's been done, what's coming up. Has a webpage now (TrexoLists) - looks at the public information and idea is to keep updated via a cron job, once a week or every few days (with help from Brooks). 

pulls in all exoplanet observations - should add other TSOs to the page as well as we should be monitoring this too

NE: longer term evil plan is for this to be a community resource

EM: how to handle brown dwarfs? NN has looked into this, get complicated. Right now quite well able to search for exoplanet programs. Can we use some kind of machine learning method?

For future it could be a good idea to ask the community to add something to the APT so we can more easily identify programs. 

magnitude is of order ~5% error on N-L solutions. we think it's v stable per instrument. Leonardo is looking into this for different datasets for NIRSpec; Nestor for NIRISS. 

MR: N-L correction coefficients are "wrong" for all instruments. best not to create a correction of a correction; let's fix the problem at the source and we can use these tests to check the fix. Has tried to elevate this issue but didn't get much attention. 

Note that MIRI has the same issue. 

Becomes relevant when working with different cadence data; can work with group differences instead of full ramps. But we need "stable" N-L corrections to do that. 

If have long ramps then for some datasets it may be better to derive a N-L correction from the data. 

MR: we need to create tickets for this to be prioritized

SK/MR: Jeroen and Achrene are working on this too and finding similar issues - will present this in net meeting. 

Scheduled to finish this work off by the end of March. Analyzing all commissioning darks to study the 1/f noise. Will also show some tests done on simulated data to try and derive an optimal correction strategy (would be good for the community to be able to simulate realistic 1/f noise-affected data so they can test their own strategies). 

deadline for cycle 2 calibration proposal in mid-March. if it's considered important to characterize the zodi background, should design some observations. 

NN: very instrument/mode dependent - not just wavelength range but also how the light is dispersed. (e.g spectral curvature). Eg NIRCan spectra are very straight, so is relatively easy to get a good background subtraction from the data. For NIRISS where we have strong curvature, this is harder. Also have to be careful not to introduce new uncertainties due to lack of precision in a zodiac background reference file

For WFSS modes (Nor P), takes all the data in the archive, masks all the sources & generates a background that way. we could do a pilot project re-analysing commissioning data & using that for correcting a later observation. NN would be in favor of doing this instead of requesting more calibration data. 

On MIRI's radar. Cycle 2 TSOs have been recommended to add a dedicated background; not sure we will ask for a dedicated cal program for more data, this is to be discussed with Greg Sloan

Substripe mode: motivated by ability to do science with the dispersed Hartmann sensor (DHS) in NIRCam

meeting again in 2 weeks