APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 2/4/13 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, John Bally, Scott Anderson, Nancy Chanover (for Jon Holtzman), Michael Strauss, Mary Beth Kaiser, Al Harper, Remy Indebetouw, Bill Ketzeback, Joe Huehnerhoff, and Bruce Gillespie. Absent: none ********************************** User feedback and comments from institutional representatives: o Washington (Scott Anderson) - Scott had nothing new to report. o Chicago (Al Harper) - Al had nothing new to report. o New Mexico State (Nancy Chanover) - Nancy remarked about the recent problems with NIC-FPS data, and Jon Holtzman is looking into it offline. John Bally added that using NFS>8 causes crashes of the system. Suzanne asked if users at Chicago and JHU would please check their recent NIC-FPS data to see if they are OK. o Princeton (Michael Strauss) - Michael had nothing new to report. o Colorado (John Bally) - John mentioned that he had problems with logins on Newton; the passwords were rejected for sftp. He will check and see if the problem still exists. o Virginia (Remy Indebetouw) - Remy had nothing new to report. o Johns Hopkins (Mary Beth Kaiser) - Mary Beth had nothing new to report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report: Mark said that aside from a few issues, the telescope systems are working well. There is a problem with one of the tertiary mirror actuators that is being monitored. Binning DIS images in the Y direction fails; this is not a new issue but is getting some attention -- if this is or will be a problem for anyone, they should let us know. After the ICC for Agile was repaired, it is now working fine. We seem to have recovered from the SPIcam Cryotiger gas leak. Updating the earlier report on the echelle given below, we now have a good vacuum and are cooling the instrument. We may need to replace the echelle ion vacuum pump, but it is unclear what the root problem of the vacuum failure was. On the NIC-FPS NSF>8 failures, Stephane Beland has determined that the software seems OK, and we are now checking the hardware. Updates on the status of NIC-FPS NSF>8 problem will be posted on the updates page on the APO 3.5m instruments website. Mark Klaene's detailed report for the reporting period follows: ************************* 3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights 11/28/12 through 1/29/13 0) Overview A lot of weather-associated lost time. Frequent storm systems about every three days came through in late December through Mid-January. Unfortunately, despite all the clouds, little moisture was accumulated. Minimal clear time was lost due to snow and ice on the roof/lightning arrestors. 1) Telescope The telescope performance has been nominal this period. There was one event that caused a pointing shift that appeared to have its root cause in a M2 actuator that failed to move due to the cold temperatures. Recovery was compounded by a less-than-perfect M3 actuator that will need servicing in the future. 2) Instruments -- DIS has been operating nominally. Both red and blue cameras have been functioning normally with good vacuum and temperature. Binning of the chips only works in the Y (rows) direction for an even number of windowed rows. Choosing an odd number for row binning causes a failure. The Agile ICC died, which was traced to a failure on the motherboard of the Dell PC. The ICC was rebuilt and moved to a server platform, and software was upgraded to make the ICC more maintainable. This should improve the overall maintainability of Agile since its delivery to APO. During the ICC work, a communication fiber was found to have low throughput and was replaced as well. The SPIcam cryotiger developed a gas leak causing an unexpected warm up. By pumping down and recharging the unit, the instrument was brought back up the next day. Cause for the leak has not been definitively identified. TripleSpec operated with no problems. Recall the slit is still locked in the 1.1" position. Echelle is not operational at this writing. The LN2 fill system had a major failure on January 27 causing the CCD to warm. Staff are working on identifying and fixing the failure as well as pump and cool the camera. Given the size and complexity of the instrument this takes several days. The instrument should be ready by the time of the meeting. NIC-FPS is operating in shared-risk observing mode due to occasional image corruption issues. It was discovered that NFS greater than 8 would cause the ICC to fail which may have been caused by the ICC rebuild that was done when the ICC failed last summer. Stephane Beland is helping to try to track down the problem. ********************************** GIFS training in Q2: Suzanne said that the GSFC team needs more time to get GIFS operable under TUI, possibly until May. We need the institutional schedulers to encourage users to ask for observing time adjacent to the training runs. Also, we need to know how many users are interested in being trained to use GIFS. ********************************** Spectroscopy in LSST era: Suzanne reported that NOAO is hosting this meeting in mid-April; Rene Walterbos is going to represent us. The ARC 3.5-m telescope has 2 magnitudes of object overlap with LSST in the jointly seen part of the sky. One possibility for 3.5m spectroscopy contributions would be to conduct followup observing of the brighter LSST transients in campaign mode, like we did during the SDSS-II SNe survey. We also need to think about how the 3.5-m telescope fits into LSST followup programs when TDSS starts on the Sloan 2.5-m. ===> ACTION: Committee members to talk with their users re LSST followup programs, and discuss at next Users Committee meeting. ********************************** Futures update: Suzanne mentioned that we are in discussion with several interested institutions that may want to join ARC or lease telescope time. One thought is to identify past 3.5-m users who are now at other non-ARC institutions to see if they are interested in either engaging their new institutions to be part of ARC, or else find a way for them to form a participation group with other institutions. If any of the Users Committee members or their users know of past 3.5-m users to contact, please do so and alert Suzanne and Rene of any possible interest. ********************************** DIS slitviewer camera design document: A white paper describin the DIS slitviewer camera design was sent to the users committee prior to the meeting. Users can obtain a copy from their representative. Bill gave the committee a brief introduction to the proposed upgrade to the DIS slitviewer. The upgrade includes a new camera that has better blue sensitivity, and the optics upgrade affords a larger FOV. If there are other motivations or improvements that users would like us to consider for the slitviewer upgrade, let us know. John thought it might be useful for the slitviewer to have a filter wheel. Remy asked about the priority of this project, and Mark said that it is relatively high priority in CIF work, behind the rewrite of the TCC software. ===> ACTION: Users should send comments about the DIS slitviewer upgrade to Bill, Mark and Suzanne. ********************************** ACTION ITEMS: [open from previous meeting]: ===> ACTION: Send new ARC partner suggestions to Suzanne and Rene. Status: Open, committee members need to keep sending suggestions. We need the names of institutions (of any size) and a named contact. ===> ACTION: Users committee members should discuss APOGEE fiber feed to 3.5-m proposal with their users and forward feedback, and ideally name(s) of interested users who would be willing to participate in an ATI proposal to Suzanne, Mark and Fred Hearty. Status: Closed for now, reopen after the APOGEE MRI proposal request for a 2nd instrument is decided. [new from this meeting]: ===> ACTION: Committee members to talk with their users re LSST followup programs, and discuss at next Users Committee meeting. ===> ACTION: Committee members to solicit omments about the DIS slitviewer upgrade. ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday 4 March at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. The agenda and other materials will be sent to the committee members during the preceding week. APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 1305 in the apo35-general archive. You can find APO the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-general/INDEX.html APO To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu APO To post a message, mail it to apo35-general@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO