This award will partially support a conference titled "Calibration and Standardization of Large Surveys and Missions in Astronomy and Astrophysics". The primary purpose of the conference is to bring together active researchers and experts in the field of astrophysical surveys to discuss advances in the areas of calibration and standardization and to start to address the challenging problems of these topics that are common to many current and planned survey projects.
The intellectual merit of the proposal is to provide a venue for experts in the fields of survey standardization and calibration to discuss recent advances in the fields, to share lessons learned from recent calibration efforts, and to foster community support for solving the challenging problems of calibration and standardization that are common to many different projects. A key goal of this conference will be to develop a minimum set of requirements that will be used in future surveys to increase the ability for data to be cross-calibrated between surveys and to make it more "archival science" friendly. This conference will also be a step in the process of having these new survey data ingested into the Virtual Observatory in a meaningful and useful way.
The broader impacts of the conference fall into two categories; community impact and participation of young researchers and underrepresented groups in the conference. The goal of the conference to lay the foundation for establishing minimum standards for calibration between surveys will have a major impact across all of astronomical research. With respect to community support, the vast majority of the requested funds will go to support the travel expenses of young investigators like graduate students and post-docs and scientists without other forms of travel support.
". The primary purpose of the conference was to bring together active researchers and experts in the field of astrophysical surveys to discuss advances in the areas of calibration and standardization and to start to address the challenging problems of these topics that are common to many current and planned survey projects. Outcomes of this project were the conference, which was attended by nearly one hundred scientists from around the world, and, the inititiation of at least two new collaborations on different aspects of calibraiton. The conference provide a venue for experts in the fields of survey standardization and calibration to discuss recent advances in the fields, to share lessons learned from recent calibration efforts, and to foster community support for solving the challenging problems of calibration and standardization that are common to many different projects. Over four days of the conference, there were about sixty talks and a dozen poster presentations, on various aspects of calibration - from hardware and instrumentations to discussion of different techniques of making measurements. The website for the conference includes abstracts, program schedule, and presenters. Conference proceedings are in preparation.
