NOTE: There is some OPEN time available on the 3.5m in early January during the AAS meeting. Please contact Suzanne and Russet if you are interested in using this time. APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 12/15/14 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Bill Ketzeback, Joe Huehnerhoff, Scott Anderson, Rachel Kuzio de Naray, Joanne Hughes Clark, John Wisniewski, Mark Hammergren, John Bally, Russet McMillan, Mary Beth Kaiser, Don York, John Wilson, Nick MacDonald ********************************** User feedback and comments from institutional representatives: o Washington - Scott had nothing to report. o Seattle - Joanne had nothing to report. o JHU - Mary Beth had nothing to report. o Oklahoma - Dome issues with ARCSAT, discussion postponed to later in the meeting. o Adler - Mark said the waether has not been cooperating for Adler lately. o Colorado - John said that he had a nice night of 0.5 arc-sec seeing with NICFPS this past week. This led to a discussion of whether seeing has shown a marked improvement recently. Questions about ventillation, types of weather and dome seeing were raised. Mark remarked that we have a long term study of dome seeing and potential improvements in the enclosure. o Chicago - Don also mentioned having excellent seeing the past few nights. o Virginia - John had nothing to report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report: 3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights 11/15/14 through 12/10/14 0) Overview Weather has been OK much of the period overall with some periods of very good weather, Site hosted a large SDSS IV meeting this period. Beth Mitchell's training to replace Gretchen by the end of the year is progressing well. - Suzanne mentioned that most of the users main interaction has to do with travel to the site. Mark asked users to give as much notice as possible for the upcoming months. 1) Telescope Telescope has been behaving well with the new TCC software. 2) Instruments DIS has been operating normally. Collimation and internal focus does vary somewhat with transition from summer to winter temperatures. Russet is watching this closely and making adjustments when practical. - Russet said there was a big focus change for recent deep cold snap. Message for users is to keep an eye on spectral focus as they are taking data. Contamination is increasing slowly and seems to be related to ambient humidity rahter than ambient temperature. - Don asked why. Mark explained the vacuum seal issue at the front of the dewar. Investigating possible corrections including improvement to dry air purge and potentially replacing vacuum seal. Agile is operational with no problems TripleSpec has an occasional instance of corrupted images. UVa is aware of the issue however problem is intermittent and difficult to troubleshoot effectively - Bill said this was only discovered during checkout and has yet to affect science. John Wilson will ask if this has occurred on other copies of TSpec. SPICam was operational during this period with no problems Echelle inter-order light is holding with no additional issues. NIC-FPS continues to operate in shared-risk observing mode due to occasional image corruption issue. NFS less than 9 is operational. GIFS is operational 3) ARCTIC The instrument development is proceeding on schedule. The dewar has a loaner CCD from STA and has been integrated with the readout electronics by Bob Leach. It is at UW for further testing and development. ICC development is in work. The optics purchase order is in process of being placed. A report on the custom shutter has been finished. Plan to start fabricating the remainder of the instrument after the first of the year. - There was some discussion about the ICC and shutter development. User input regarding having separate config window in TUI would be useful. Binning can only be 1 - 4, and rectangular binning is possible but not sure if it will be implemented. Don asked about narrow band filters and how many filters fit in the wheel. Joe responded that there are 6 positions for filters. Instrument is on budget and on schedule so far for commissioning this summer and potentially shared-risk observing in the fall. ********************************** o farewell to Michael Strauss and Princeton We have really appreciated Michael's input on this committee. It has been valuable and insightful. We also appreciate the service Michael and the rest of the Princetom community has provided ARC and APO over the years. Note that Chicago is officially finished as an ARC partner at the end of December 2014, but they are still owed a good deal of time over the next year, so Don York will remain with us on the committee. o reminder about 35general mailing list migration We will turn on the new listserver on or near January 1. The new list will purge many of the old email addresses including Princeton and others no longer affilliated with ARC or the 3.5-m. Once the mailing list is active we will work with Michael Strauss to get the archive of the old list on APO computers. The list will still be called apo35-general but will be at apo.nmsu.edu instead of at astro.princeton.edu o 3.5m wiki now includes ARCSAT Jon Holtzman sent out a message last week reminding users of his new Wikipage.The idea of this page is primarily to supplement site documentation especially for data reductions for 3.5-m and Arcsat users. It also can be a place where users can contribute discussions or questions about use of the telescopes or instruments as well as picking up tips from other users. A few people have already contributed, especially about echelle data reduction. ARCSAT users are especially encouraged to start using the wiki to share their experiences. o ARCSAT in Q1 2015 Arcsat is currently scheduled as shared risk observing through 1st week of Feb. Sometime in Janauary there will be the next call for proposals. Lots of good data are being taken. There are still some rocky transitions around the time of instrument changes. A policy change has been implemented which we hope will help: the first half night following a change in cameras will now be considered engineering time to smooth this transition. Don York expressed his concern that the attention the 3.5-m Obs-specs are giving the ARCSAT users has taken away attention from 3.5-m. Suzanne said that the plan is that the engineering on the 0.5-m would be done by someone who was not scheduled as a 3.5-m Obs Spec on the same night. The shared risk phase on ARCSAT is basically complete and we are ready to switch to normal operations for the next proposal cycle. We will work out how to colect payment for time ($500/week) for the telescope once we are out of shared risk mode. Don asked for information on the scheduling in week blocks. He said he might be interested in telescope time but did not need full weeks. Suzanne said that they would do their best to partner up smaller programs as long as there were no filter or instrument changes to fill up a full week. o update on APOGEE fiber study Jon Holzmann was not on so Nick MacDonald led the discussion. Last meeting we had a discussion about the possibility of networking the 4 telescopes on site together with fiber bundles. We formed a subcommittee to review Nick's white paper and form a science case for such a project. Nick expressed that we should consider this as an infrustructure improvement project for the site, to get the conduit and trenching done. Two eight inch conduits are planned. Then add fiber to the APOGEE instrument down at the 2.5-m support bldg. The plan would initially be for ~200 fibers but other fiber runs could be added later. Don mentioned a possible science case. Nick will organize a phone call of interested users in January. John Wilson said he will try to recruit some interest in this project from other UVa users and some SDSS partners. o optical spectrograph design study (action item) - Hawley, Klaene Polled the committee members for a list of their users who expressed interest in making contributing remarks and science cases. JHU - Steve McCandless (Suzanne mentioned that Steve Smee from the JHU IDG is also interested.) GS - Mike Crenshaw, Misty Bentz, Rachel Kuzio de Naray UC - Don York UW - Scott Anderson NMSU - Rene Walterbos (was volunteered by Suzanne) We will try to organize a phone call about this in the next month. o Forest service proposal for site infrastructure improvements Nick MacDonald will work on this soon. We want it to be presented to forest service early in 2015. Mark expressed that it could take many months to a year to work its way through the bureaucracy. Don suggested having Mike E. pull the orginal cooperative agreement for relevance. o Actions - group =====> ACTION: Users Committee members to poll their constituents to engage and enlist people who are willing to be involved with the specification and development of a new optical spectrograph. Was discussed above, but we will leave this open to get more input in January. ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday 26 January. 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 1351 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