Current Survey Status
Last update: 01/02/2011
In the second halves of both 2009 and 2010, efforts to replace bad-weather fields continued. The first full globally-calibrated release expected in 2011 will still have a few small holes in satisfactory coverage: these are mainly in the winter part of the northern Galactic Plane, near the Anticentre. Data-taking has not yet been declared complete.
Update on: 01/05/2009
The above picture shows the status of the last section of the northern plane, as judged after data processing had been completed. It is this section that needs the largest number of repeat observations to bring all data above the survey acceptance threshold.
Update on 16/12/2008
The 2007 observing allocation was subject to very poor weather conditions, particularly in late November and December, which meant that fields in the Anticentre region were still undone at the beginning of 2008.
Time allocated to IPHAS by the CAT and PATT TAGs for semester B in 2008 met with mixed fortune. The November CAT allocation encountered mixed weather and a significant WFC detector problem. This had been largely fixed by the December PATT week, and the weather was more continuously usable. As a consequence, every IPHAS field pair has now been observed at least once. The remaining issue is to bring up all fields to survey standard. The extent of the need in this regard will be appraised once all data in hand have been pipelined at CASU.
Update on 12/4/2007
We hope to have completed data-taking by the end of 2007.
The first IPHAS observations were taken at the INT between August and December 2003. Towards the end of the year the first pipeline processing started at CASU in Cambridge, and was complete by the beginning of February 2004. A similar pattern of observing and processing has been repeated for three further observing seasons, with around 2 months observing allocated annually to date by all three national TAGs. Over a quarter of all allocated nights have been completely lost to weather (the greatest losses being in October-November). In the northern sky map below, the green/yellow/red parts of the survey region are those for which we have obtained at least one observation. The main areas outstanding (in black) are in the Galactic third quadrant, as the Plane approaches the celestial equator.
The above shows the situation after the processing of all 2005 data. Note that the green data points, representing fields meeting basic requirements for acceptance into the final database, were plotted last. This results in an optimistic view of the present status. Our present quantitative estimate is that 72 percent of the survey area has been observed/processed to our preferred quality standard (of seeing better than 1.7 arcseconds). This rises to 78 percent if the seeing acceptance is raised to 2 arcsec. 95 percent of all fields have been observed at least once.