We have designed data processing server system to include data archiving, photometric processing and light curve analysis for KMTNet (Korea Microlensing Telescope Network). Outputs of each process are reported to the main photometric database, which manages the whole processing steps and archives the photometric results. The database is developed using ORACLE 11g Release 2 engine. It allows to select objects applying any set of criteria such as RA/DEC coordinate and Star ID, etc. We tested the performance of the database using the OGLE photometric data. The searching time for querying 70,000,000 records was under 1 second. The database is fully accessed using query forms via web page.
Productivity of the Giant Magellan Telescope is estimated based on the annual number of papers produced by the currently operating large telescopes such as the telescope at the ESO La Silla observatory, CFHT, AAT, the Magellan telescopes, ESO VLT, Japanese Subaru, the Gemini telescopes, and the Keck telescopes. We find that the amount of papers produced by a large telescope is roughly proportional to the diameter of its primary mirror. With this fact, we estimate the SCI-paper productivity of the Giant Magellan Telescope by extrapolating the productivity of the above-mentioned large telescopes. Moreover, according to the paper written in 2001 by Benn and Sanchez, the amount of highly-cited papers produced by a large telescope is roughly proportional to the light-gathering power of the telescope or the square of the diameter. Hence, we survey the productivity of Nature-class papers of the large telescopes and extrapolate the relationship to estimate the productivity of the Nature-class papers by using the Giant Magellan telescope of a filled aperture 21.4 meters in diameter. We expect that Korean astronomers will be able to produce annually 60 SCI-class papers and 20 Nature-class papers with high scientific impact by using the telescope-time corresponding to the 10% share of the Giant Magellan Telescope.
The characteristics of the BOES (Bohyunsan Observatory Echelle Spectrograph) CCD camera is presented. In order to get optimum gain and readout noise of the CCD, we examine the variation of the gain and readout noise by changing the value of output drain voltage of the CCD and measuring the gain using transfer curve, which is defined as the plot of variance versus mean exposure level of a homogeneous light onto the CCD surface. The gain and readout noises are optimised to be 0.5e −/ADU and 3e−, which is good for highest signal-to-noise ratio and contrast for the low light level characteristics of the BOES. We also measure the dark count of the CCD by getting five dark images with 3600 seconds exposure time. The mean dark count from median stacked dark images is essentially zero. A table of positions of defected pixels is also presented.
A CCD camera for the BOES (Bohyunsan Observatory Echelle Spectrograph) has been developed. The camera consists of a 2048 × 4096 format CCD, a SDSU Gen-I CCD controller, and a continuous flow cryostat (CFC) designed by the ESO. In order to control the CCD under SDSU Gen-I controller, the voltage level of all the biases and clocks were lowered by -6V. The CFC showed cooling time of about 10 hour, after which the chip temperature settled down with variation less than ±1°C. The final chip temperature is around -105 °C with the setting value for the CFC as -170 °C
UBVI CCD photometry has been obtained for a region around the Wolf-Rayet star WR 12. We found two young stellar associations in the observed field: the nearer one comprises the field members of Vela OBI association at d = 1.8kpc, while the farther one is the young open cluster Bochum 7 (Bo 7) at d = 4.8kpc. The stars associated with Bo 7 showed no central concentration which suggests that Bo 7 is not a young open cluster but simply a local concentration in the density of young stars belonging to the OB association (Vel OB3). These two associations have similar ages but remarkably different mass function slopes (Γ = -2.1 ± 0.3 for Vel OBI and -1.0 ± 0.3 for Bo 7). The stars in Vel OBI shows an evident age spread (ΔT~ 9Myr). We also found two strong Hα emission stars - WR 12 and #1066 - from narrow band Hα photometry.
Open clusters are useful tools to investigate the structure and evolution of the Galactic disk. We have started a long-term project to obtain UBVI CCD photometry of open clusters which were little studied before, using the Doyak 1.8 m telescope of Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory in Korea. The primary goals of this project are (1) to make a catalog of UBVI photometry of open clusters, (2) to make an atlas of open clusters, and (3) to survey and monitor variable stars in open clusters. Here we describe this project and report the first results based on preliminary analysis of the data on four open clusters in the survey sample: Be 14, Cr 74, Biu 9, and NGC 2355. Isochrone fitting of the color-magnitude diagrams of the clusters shows that all of them are intermediate age to old (0.3-1.6 Gyrs) open clusters with moderate metallicity.