After suggestions/discussions from APO staff and the Users Committee, I have set up a "users" wiki for issues related to APO observing/data/science at: http://astronomy.nmsu.edu:8000/apo-wiki The idea of this is to have an off-site wiki for users and staff to post and share useful information without having to go through APO firewall and quality-control issues. This is not meant to be an official documentation site -- for that, the APO pages are the right place. But the users wiki provides a place for users to post information that goes beyond documentation, e.g., information about data reduction techniques and packages, various instrument performance/limitations at the scientific level, etc. Given the number of relatively new users and the potential for more new users in the future, we thought that this might be a particularly good time to have an information-sharing site. If you visit the wiki, you will see a number of categories of things that I personally think it would be interesting to see information on, many of which I know people have worked on, but if you go into any of these categories (currently a single page for each instrument), you'll notice that there is no actual information there! In other words, it's a mostly empty wiki at this point. An exception to this is that Karen Kinemuchi has put in some information on data reduction for echelle and DIS. We've also included a section for people to post things related to ARCSAT. If there's some question/information you would like to have addressed, send a message to apo35-general, and encourage people to answer by posting on the wiki. Feel free to post unsolicited information. As an unmoderated user wiki, there is no official quality control. So users should take information here at their own risk! The value of a wiki is often related to the degree of organization in the site, so hopefully people will keep that under consideration. I have the site set up so that there is no access control for viewing the site, but if you want to post on it, you need to register for an account, which you can do simply by registering at the link on the upper right (no approval is needed). I think this will allow people to see who posted information (via the timeline), so choose a name that allows yourself to be recognized. I am trying to back up the site regularly, but no one should consider that the contents of the wiki are a guaranteed archive! With public access, no guarantee that someone won't come in and screw stuff up (although this is in principle recoverable -- but a multiple disk failure wouldn't be). ******************************** Jon Holtzman, Professor Department Head, Astronomy New Mexico State University holtz@nmsu.edu ********************************* APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 1347 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