Minutes of APO 3.5m User's Committee Phone Conference Monday, September 8, 1997 Attending: Rene Walterbos, Bruce Gillespie, Ed Turner (Chair), Michael Strauss (taking minutes), Chris Stubbs, Alan Uomoto, Jeff Secker Absent: Ed Kibblewhite This was a brief meeting; with the community workshop to be held at APO at the end of next week, we did not discuss some items in detail. Agenda: Status report on current shutdown How to schedule shutdowns Agenda for community meeting Funds for 3-year plans Half vs. Whole nights Progress on DIS *****************Status report on current shutdown. The repairs are keeping on schedule, modulo a bit of a slowdown with everyone on the mountain catching colds. Mark Klaene has done a test washing of tertiary. He has put together a cleaning procedure. Cleaning improved reflectivity by 2-3%, but added some fine scratches. So the tertiary will be realuminized at Sunspot this week. Installation of new ventilation tube system for 3.5m primary is in progress. The loosening of these tubes is an issue for 2.5m primary as well! Users now have direct software control (from a Unix window) over the arc lamps. Wonderful! Work has also happened on drives, should cure many of the oscillation problems. Also problems fixed in rotator, to fix some of the rotator stalls. More details at the community workshop. *****************How to schedule shutdowns At our last meeting, we discussed various alternatives. Ed Turner posted a synthesis of the discussion, and a proposed policy, on apo35-general #160. In brief: Let shutdowns fall as they may (like rain), but insitutions could ask for time assigned explicitly to the institution, to schedule themselves, guaranteed free of shutdown. No-one took advantage of this for the fourth quarter (although not all institutional schedulers/TAC members subscribe to apo35-general; they should!). *****************Agenda for the Community Meeting Will be distributed to apo35-general at the end of the week by Rene Walterbos. There may be some local media presence. Some of the Sunspot staff may also attend. *****************Funds for 3-year plans There is an imminent budget crunch on 3-year plan: the secondary is getting more expensive than originally budgetted (mounting cell, polishing charges, etc., are higher than we hoped). A shortfall of substantial size is likely. Still working on options. Will be discussed at the Community Meeting. ****************Half vs. whole nights Uomoto: Splitting the nights in half makes some programs difficult, with calibrations. However, people can always explicitly ask for full nights in proposal, although not everyone may be aware of this. We should discuss how to maximize efficiency. Should half-nights or whole nights be the default? Perhaps half nights are sensible during long winter nights but not during short summer ones; we could have a different default during different parts of the year. We are finding ourselves drifting back to "ordinary" scheduling of other telescope. Why is this? Stubbs: Because basic promise of this telescope (especially 5-minute instrument changes, efficient calibration) are not in place! Let's get 3-year plan in place. ****************DIS progress Rene Walterbos is talking to Lick Observatory about getting chips from them. They may have chips available for us, which we should propose for. We will discuss this further at the meeting. Uomoto: New 1.6" and 1.9" air slits are in place, with clean stainless-steel surfaces. We may want to get 3" or 4" slit as well, for use in high-res mode. The new medium resolution blue grating is in pipeline. Thee medium res red grating we wanted is not available. Alan is looking at various alternatives. Last meeting minutes are approved. Next meeting is Monday, October 27, 1997. 12:30 EDT APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 166 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