Apache Point Observatory 3.5m User's Committee Meeting ****************September 8, 1998********************** Attending: Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, Ed Turner, Jeff Brown, Chris Stubbs, Alan Uomoto, Jon Holtzman. Missing: Ed Kibblewhite Shutdown: The shutdown tasks were mostly for repairs that make things more reliable and easier to maintain; most of these were successfully accomplished. There was a plan to clean and resurface the drive boxes, especially the altitude drive, but this was not done due to lack of time and personnel. This will be done during scheduled engineering time in the fourth quarter. Interestingly, during the shutdown, the weather was so bad anyway, that only roughly 3 clear nights were lost in July. Status of GRIM2: It shows some flaky behavior; every once in a while, it returns a screwball frame, as if there are electronic glitches. There is a fear that the GRIM could fail catastrophically at any time, and could not be brought back to life. It is also no longer a state of the art instrument, and is no longer competitive with IR imaging instruments at other sites. Finally, the IR expertise that built GRIM2 has mostly left the ARC consortium, and their expertise has not been transferred to the APO staff, so it is difficult to maintain the instrument. There have been stated plans for upgrading the instrument (for example, so that it can do multiple reads), but these have never gotten off the ground. In the meantime, the bright time is being more and more under-subscribed. Turner and Gillespie are looking into the possibility of getting new IR instruments from outside the consortium, as there is not any obvious expertise/interest within the consortium for building such an instrument (or just keeping GRIM2 alive). Observing Specialists: Camron Hastings has accepted an offer to become a full-time observing specialist. We're up to our full complement of 3. As an experiment, we are trying a new scheduling of observing specialists: most nights, the night will be split at midnight between 2 observing specialists. This allows more continuity between afternoon setups and observing, and means that observing specialists won't have impossibly long runs in the winter. Rotator problems: The rotator has been mis-behaving quite a bit over the last week. During shutdown, lots of guider mechanicals were overhauled. As a consequence, the rotator movement is much more smooth. The mechanical stiction is possibly not longer well-matched to the servo motors that drive it. Also, the drive amplifier that drives the rotator was rebuilt; there seems to be some real problems with this new, "improved" amplifier. This has been swapped out now, and sent back to the manufacturer; there is hope that the rotator should behave better now. The APO staff continue to work on it. Status of Secondary: As of last week, f/9 secondary for MMT was almost complete at Steward; we are next! Thus our place in the queue has not slipped. News from Echelle: There will be a meeting at Chicago, September 17, between Turner, Gillespie, Stubbs, Jeff Morgan, Ed Jenkins, and the people building the echelle. They will discuss the current status of the instrument and its software, and the schedule for bringing the instrument to the mountain. SPICAM had an electronics failure in the dewar recently. It was sent back to UW, where it was repaired, the cryogenics is being revamped, replacing the LN2 system with a mechanical "cryo-tiger" system. The goal is to get it back in operation for the upcoming dark run. In addition, there will be some upgrades to electronics and software, including faster clears, and perhaps more flexibility in the read-out time/read noise trade-off. DIS proposal: Magnier and Stubbs of UW have put in a proposal to NSF to do upgrades to DIS: in particular, to install new detectors with better sampling and wavelength coverage, and improved read electronics. Stubbs is fairly optimistic about this proposal. Long-term plans: we need new instruments! User's committee stands strongly behind this statement. Miscellaneous: A lot of tree thinning has been happening in the forests nearby recently, to improve tree's health (it reduces the spread of diseases), and to reduce fire danger. The Forest Service burns the left-over branches, etc.; creating a real danger of falling ash. There have been discussions with the Forest Service to do these burns only once every few months, at previously scheduled times (say, at full moon, when engineering work can be scheduled), rather than intermittently. The new electronic web schedule is working out nicely. Check it out, off the APO home page; and send suggestions to Craig Loomis. There is a trade form there as well, useful for people to exchange time with one another. The number of people who have expressed interest in the APO User's Community meeting in Seattle October 23-24 is quite small (and consists almost entirely of people from Seattle and Pullman!); the User's Committee will work to drum up more interest among their respective departments. The previous two such meetings have been very successful, and have helped us decide the directions we want to go with the observatory. In this respect, we discussed the highest long-term priority, which is new and state of the art instrumentation for the observatory. What this really requires is a mechanism in place to facilitate such instruments being built by the consortium. The User's Committee will draft a brief letter to the director, stating that this is their priority. Last month's minutes are approved. Next meeting, Monday, September 28, 12:30 PM APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 305 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