Hi Guys,

  I'm in some agreement with TJ, and I also will be out of touch
tomorrow/today unless something unfortunate happens.  I still think
that we will be selecting magnitude/flux limited catalogs, not S/N
catalogs.  S/N has no *astrophysical* meaning. The only reason I haven't
complained more loudly on this is that it probably doesn't matter
in the end for 99.9% of the users as long as flux limited, complete
and reliable catalogns can be extracted to K=13.5, H=14.3, etc. 

The flags we need have to do with contamination, with photometric
conditions, with background, with reality checks, etc. most of which are
already there.

Cheers from Aspen,

John Huchra
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden St.  MS20
Cambridge, MA 02138-1516
Ph:  617-495-7375
Fax: 617-495-7467
huchra@cfa.harvard.edu
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~huchra

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From Tom Jarrett

You did remind me that I'm not too keen on the ABCDE business.
I would prefer to quote the actual S/N value (5-99).
But we still must face the duplicity of S/N measurements:
do we use the fixed circular (r=7") and/or the
isophotal?  For the query draw, we use an "or",
so this would be the default convention I guess.

Most average users (like myself) will not care about the
distinction between high and low SNR catalogs.  What we really
want is the "union" of the two -- all of the sources that are put -->
-- out. 
These can always be cut at whatever mag or SNR thresholds desired.
John will undoubtedly disagree with me, but then again,
John is not average :)