APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 10/27/14 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Rachel Kuzio de Naray, Scott Anderson, John Wisniewski, Michael Strauss, John Bally, Rene Walterbos, Mary Beth Kaiser, Remy Indebetouw, and Bruce Gillespie ********************************** User feedback and comments from institutional representatives: o Washington - Scott had no issues or concern. For the 3.5-m/APOGEE fiber link, one person was possibly interested. o Virginia - Remy said there were no user complaints from UVa. o Georgia State - Rachel reported that everything is going well. Nobody at GSU had an opinion on putting in a fiber link from the 3.5-m telescope to the APOGEE instrument. o Princeton - Michael noted that PU users were relatively quiet. Suzanne mentioned that there was a recent Princeton ToO request that was accommodated. o Colorado - John had no user concerns. There is strong enthusiasm for a 3.5-m/APOGEE fiber connection at Boulder. o Johns Hopkins - Mary Beth has heard no feedback from JHU users. o NMSU - No report. o Seattle - No report. o Oklahoma - John said that the Oklahoma users had no concerns. o NAPG - No report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report: Mark highlighted the unusually bad September weather; October has been better. After 24 years of service, Gretchen Van Doren is retiring at the end of the year. Her replacement, Beth Mitchell, will start in November. The telescope has been generally well-behaved, with only a few small problems related to the recent upgrades to the Telescope Control Computer hardware and software. For the instruments, there are no big issues at the moment. For example, the echelle inter-order stray light appears to be back to normal after warming and pumping the detector dewar. Engineers from the GSFC made improvements to the cryogenic systems on the GIFS that have significantly improved the LN2 hold time. The CCD detector for the new ARCTIC imager was not delivered as promised and we are discussing options. Work continues on the optics and electronics for ARCTIC. Bruce noted that there were some recent reports of outstanding seeing (~0.3 arcsec) in the night logs, and Mark said that this could be the result of new collimation procedures being used. ************************* 3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights 09/25/14 through 10/22/14 0) Overview Weather finally broke for the start of October and we resumed normal observing after being shut out for nearly all of September. Gretchen Van Doren who has been with APO for 24 years is retiring at the end of the year. A replacement for her has been hired and will start November 1. Her name is Beth Mitchell. Beth is new to APO and will take some time to settle in and even begin to fill the huge void that Gretchen will leave. 1) Telescope The new TCC has been completed and transitioned to maintenance mode with a few minor upgrades still being pursued. There have been a couple minor issues with tracking and learning the new features of the TCC. 2) Instruments o DIS has been operating normally; o Agile is operational; o TripleSpec had no operational problems this period; o SPIcam was operational during this period; o Echelle inter-order light is good after last months work with no additional issues; o NIC-FPS continues to operate in shared-risk observing mode due to occasional image corruption issue. NFS less than 9 is operational; o GIFS is operational. GSFC personnel came to APO and after working on the dewar more than doubled the LN2 hold time. 3) ARCTIC The instrument development is proceeding on schedule. The CCD we are purchasing did not meet specifications and so we will be testing and integrating using a loaner CCD until a new batch is made and we can get a good one. The dewar integration with the engineering grade detector is nearly complete. We will not be able to incorporate single quadrant readout as initially hoped due to the way the chip is wired. We are finalizing the optics quote. ********************************** Georgia State joining ARC: Suzanne reported that the ARC Board has approved the GSU induction into ARC. Theirs will be a 1/16th share, beginning on 1 January. Naturally this is cause for much celebration, and we welcome GSU as a new ARC partner! ********************************** ARCSAT update: Mark mentioned that there has been recent engineering work done on ARCSAT, including the realuminization of the primary mirror. Other improvements include upgrades to the telescope control system, thanks to help given by Jack Dembicky. We are working on an option for manual focussing. The present system defaults to autofocus, which is not always needed. The Quarter 4 schedule, i.e., mid-October through early February, has been issued and the observing has begun. We are still operating in shared-risk mode. In Quarter 1, we may start implementation of a system to charge users for telescope time. There is also a tentative plan this quarter to trade ARCSAT time with UWisconsin for time on the WIYN 0.9-meter at Kitt Peak. Whether this continues into the future is undetermined at present. Suzanne stressed that it is important that ARCSAT users always fill out the night log, which is the means for problem reporting, general user feedback, and how we derive user statistics. Furthermore, ARCSAT users should log in to TUI at the beginning of each night and notify the 3.5-m Observing Specialist that they are going to be observing. ********************************** Old versions of TUI: Although it is not a serious problem, Mark noted that some users are using 2012 versions of TUI. We encourage users to always use the current version of TUI, especially now that we are running under the new TCC. An updated Windows version of TUI is pending. The current released version of TUI (for Macs, linux) is 2.3.1. The beta version, 2.3.2, is OK to use, especially if you need any of its new features that are self-documented in the version history. ********************************** NRC O/IR committee: Rene reported on a recent meeting of the NSF/NRC Optical-Infrared committee that he participated in a couple weeks ago. He noted that LSST will not be doing their own follow-up observations so there is a lot of discussion and planning about what telescopes will be available. There is renewed interest in resurrecting the AURA Coordinating Council of Observatory Research Directors (aka ACCORD), as well as exploring inter-observatory time trades, and robotic telescopes. The future of WIYN has improved some with a new partner and possible NASA support. The NSF support levels remain constrained. The OIR study report (expected in a few months) will have specific recommendations that may impact APO. ********************************** APOGEE fiber link to 3.5m: John Bally said that Colorado astronomers are enthusiastic about getting a fiber feed (single, or IFU) from the APOGEE NIR spectrograph at the Sloan Foundation Telescope run to the 3.5-m telescope. There are exciting scientific possibilities for doing NIR multi-object spectroscopy of young stars. There followed an extended discussion about establishing the fiber link that ranged from a simple single-fiber feed to a more complicated IFU system. Suzanne said that we need a larger body of compelling scientific motivation for this project if it is to be implemented soon, especially since there will likely be significant scheduling issues while SDSS-IV is operating (until 2019-20). ********************************** Other business Michael Strauss asked about the migration of the apo35-general mailing list from Princeton to APO. Bill Ketzeback and Jon Brinkmann have the list set up, and we will implement it in January when Princeton and Chicago are no longer ARC members. This will allow us to remove old users from the list during the switchover. The 35-general email archive also needs to be migrated. ********************************** ACTION ITEMS: [open from previous meeting]: =====> Action: Users committee representatives to gather science slides for Board report and send to Suzanne and Mark by October 15. Status: A few institutions were reminded and promised to respond ASAP. Action closed. =====> Action: users committee to gather information from users about scientific interest in a fiber feed to APOGEE (2.5m) and smaller telescopes on site. Status: Remains open for another month to gather additional scientific input. [new from this meeting]: none ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday 17 November. 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 1346 in the apo35-general archive. 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