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Chandra      |             CC     XX XX    OO OO          | CXC
Electronic   |            CC       XXX    OO   OO         | Number 49
Bulletin     |             CC     XX XX    OO OO          | March
             |              CCC  XX   XX    OOO           | 2006
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Welcome to the Chandra X-ray Center's Electronic News Bulletin Number 49.

CXC Web site: cxc.harvard.edu

If you would like to unsubscribe from this alias, simply reply to this message
to let us know.  

Please use this website to update your address or email: 
          http://cxc.harvard.edu/cdo/udb/userdat.html

Contents:

1.  PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT of HEAD 2006 
  
2.  Conference: Extreme Properties of Neutron Stars: Theory and Observations
     
3.  Reprocessing III  

4.  Safari Users and Chandra Data Archive Retrievals II  

 
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Item 1.  PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT of HEAD 2006
==============================================

Meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD)
                          of the
               American Astronomical Society

              October 4-7, 2006 (Wed. - Sat.)
       Stanford Court Hotel, San Francisco, California


Email summary:

* Mark your calendars, bookmark the conference website and
   get on the conference mailing list:

      http://www.confcon.com/head2006/head06.php

* Abstracts due July 21st to be published in B.A.A.S


This message has been sent to various email exploders and we
apologize for any duplication. If you are interested in attending this
meeting, please visit the conference website and sign up to be put
on the email list. All future announcements/updates will only go to
this new list, which will not be shared or used for any other
purpose.

Conference Website (meeting logistics, registration, and abstract
submission):

http://www.confcon.com/head2006/head06.php"

**************************************************************

The High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) will hold its next
Divisional meeting in San Francisco, CA from Wednesday
October 4, 2006 through Saturday, October 7, 2006. The meeting will be
held atop Nob Hill at the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco and
will be hosted by Eureka Scientific Inc.

We strongly encourage HEAD members, and the wider community,
to join us for this special meeting in October.

Head Executive Committee

Steve Murray (chair)
Mitch Begelman (vice-chair)
Christine Jones (secretary)
Bryan Gaensler
Rita Sambruna
Tod Strohmayer
Chris Reynolds
Julie McEnery
Roger Romani
Roger Blandford (past chair)
Ilana Harris (press officer)

Local Organizing Committee Chair

Steve Boggs, University of California

Please contact John Vallerga (headmeeting06@earthlink.net,
510-530-1688) for any help with your logistical needs
and/or any questions regarding this meeting.

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Item 2.  Conference:  Extreme Properties of Neutron Stars: Theory and Observations
=====================================================================


Here is an announcement for a second session at the Marcel                    
Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity which may be of interest to the high  
energy community in addition to the session mentioned in Chandra  
Electronic Bulletin #48.                                                      


Dear Colleague:

We would like to announce the meeting:

Extreme Properties of Neutron Stars: Theory and Observations 

This is a parallel session during the 11th Marcel Grossmann Meeting
on General Relativity. The MG11 meeting will take place at the Freie
Universitaet, Berlin, Germany, on July 23-29 2006.

The aim of this sessions is to bring together both observers and 
theoreticians working on topics related to the extreme properties of
neutron stars: Extreme magnetic fields and spins, gravitational-wave
emission, X-ray and radio burst activity, equation of state, etc.  
The session will focus on:

Anomalous X-ray pulsars
Soft gamma-ray repeaters
Millisecond radio and X-ray pulsars
Rotating radio transients
High magnetic field radio pulsars
Neutron stars as strong gravitational wave emitters
Neutron star equation of state

Abstract Due : May 15
Registration Due : May 30

The web page of the session is:

http://www.sron.nl/~nanda/MG11/main_mg11.html

For further information, contact:

Mariano Mendez (mariano@sron.nl) or Nanda Rea (n.rea@ron.nl), or visit
the website of the MG11 meeting at:

http://www.icra.it/MG/mg11/

Thanks,

Nanda Rea & Mariano Mendez


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Item 3. Reprocessing III
========================

The third reprocessing of Chandra data was started in February 2006 
and will cover the entire mission.  The data will be processed in the 
following time order:

	- data from January 2005 to January 2006; then 
	- December 2004 back to the start of the mission

Currently CXCDS Operations has completed reprocessing ~10% of the mission.

The quality of the reprocessed data will be better because of improvements 
in software and, especially, calibrations, since the current default data 
in the archive were created.  Please refer to the Reprocessing III web 
page for more details:

	http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/repro3.html

Whether the new data version would affect any scientific conclusions drawn 
on the basis of the older versions depends on many factors: the nature of 
the conclusions, the type of analysis, the signal-to-noise ratio, etc. 
Ultimately, the user may need to make a comparison in order to judge 
whether the changes are significant for her or his purposes. To aid in 
that assessment we have summarized the most significant CalDB and software 
changes in the above link.  

Note also, that the new products will be fully compatible with the current 
version of CIAO, something that is not necessarily the case for older data 
versions.

All data are being versioned and stored in the Chandra Data Archive.  PIs 
will receive email notification of data processed within 1 year of the 
public release date of the observation.  All public data are available 
through WebChaser.

	http://cda.harvard.edu/chaser

Reprocessing III progress will be posted in future Chandra bulletins.
You can check the status of individual Obsids by using the processing 
Status tool.

	http://cxc.harvard.edu/soft/op/op_pst.html


- The CXC DS & SDS teams


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Item 4.  Safari Users and Chandra Data Archive Retrievals II  
============================================================


In a previous bulletin (#46) we reported that Safari users were having
difficulty retrieving data requested from WebChaser, if they tried to
follow the link provided by WebChaser.
Recently, this has been resolved and users of Safari (or at least its
recent versions) should now be able to follow that link and retrieve
their data without problems.
With thanks to Dave Pooley who provided the solution.

Arnold Rots



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