Minutes of APO 3.5-m User's Committee Phone Conference Monday, December 14, 1998 Attending: Rene Walterbos, Jeff Brown, Bruce Gillespie (taking minutes), Ed Turner (Chair), Xiaohui Fan (substituting for Michael Strauss), Gene Magnier (substituting for Chris Stubbs), Ed Kibblewhite Not attending: Alan Uomoto Agenda: SPIcam status Report on the 11/24 ARC BoG meeting Echelle Uncertified remote observers Standardized acknowledgement New 2ndary status Approval of minutes and scheduling next telecon SPIcam status: Weekend work by site staff and UWashington engineers seem to have SPIcam close to being back in service. A spare Cryotiger unit was shipped from Seattle and installed Saturday. It seems to be working OK except that there is some problem with temperature stability related to its "heater." This is being worked on today but the feeling is that we can use the instrument as is. The bad unit will be shipped back to the manufacturer, and some attention needs to be given to cold-temperature operation of the unit. The possibility of keeping the Cryotiger pump running in some sort of standby or offline mode, even when the camera was allowed to warm up, was suggested as a possible means of avoiding the cold weather start-up problems. Report on the 11/24 ARC BoG meeting: The Board approved re-appointment of Ed Turner as 3.5-m Director. It also approved the 1999 site operations and the third year of the 3-yr Plan engineering budget proposals. In particular, the proposal of Jon Davis becoming the full-time (from half-time) 3.5-m Telescope Engineer was endorsed, and becomes effective 1 January 1999. The 3-yr plan items of priority this year are tertiary rotation and motions, installing the new 2ndary, improved telescope and instrument baffling, and other items related to 3-yr plan improvements. The Board considered other strategic items, including: - in concept, the continuation of ~$300k/year to be assessed in future years for new instrumentation support and other telescope improvement projects - the use of telescope time as motivation for instrument developers to bring new instruments to APO for general use - future consideration of funding for site capital improvement projects (e.g., replacing the phone system, an aluminizing facility, etc., see Appendix) Echelle: Bruce Gillespie reported (for Shu-I Wang) that the Echelle installation is nearing completion with only minor delays and problems, and that the instrument goes on the sky tonight. The echelle team plans to wind down by the end of this week, and then return to APO after the holidays to continue the scientific commissioning. There is optimism that "shared-risk" use could be possible during February/March, and that the instrument could be released to the community near the beginning of Q2. Uncertified remote observers: Ed Turner led a discussion on policy related to remote use of the 3.5-m by "uncertified observers." By policy, all remote observers must have spent three nights at APO to become "certified" for remote operation of the telescope. The policy allows uncertified observers to use the facility remotely only under the supervision of a certified observer. Ed clarified that this meant that the supervision of an uncertified observer had to be continuous throughout the night, and that physical presence with the uncertified remote observer was required. The UC endorsed this policy interpretation. Standardized acknowledgement: Ed Turner reported that the ARC BoG reversed its previous position and unanimously adopted a resolution stating that authors of publications based (in whole or part) on data obtained with the 3.5-meter should be requested to include a footnote to the title giving a standardized acknowledgement. Among other things, this should make it much easier to conduct electronic database searches for APO 3.5-m publications. After reviewing several such standardized acknowledgements required by various other observatories, Ed chose to stick to a short and simple style and did not, for example, enumerate the ARC institutions, mention NSF support of the telescope construction, etc. The UC basically agreed with this proposal, with the addition of the phrase "owned and" added below. *Based on observations obtained with the Apache Point Observatory (APO) 3.5-meter telescope, which is owned and operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC). The rationale for this policy shift is in part due to searching publications for APO data. Some concern exists on whether this acknowledgement will be "seen" by search engines if it is a footnote as opposed to an acknowledgement. After the UC telecon, Rene Walterbos ran some tests and reported: "I tried some searches with ADS to see what we can pick up to easily find the 3.5-m papers. Unfortunately, it doesn't look too good. Footnotes to titles are NOT seen as part of the title, so a footnote acknowledging ARC will not be found. Also, the "text" searches are restricted to the abstract text, not the paper text. Nevertheless, I do advocate we continue with the idea of a boiler plate, since I suspect that search engines will continue to improve, and I can at least easily check if a paper was using 3.5-m data if it has a boiler plate somewhere. A footnote to the title would probably be easier to find (since it appears on the 1st page) than a note in the acknowledgements." New 2ndary status: May be finished at SOML early next year, plans afoot to have it mounted and in service as early as end of Q1 next year. Last meeting minutes are approved. Next meeting is Monday, January 11, 1999. 12:30 Eastern Time Appendix: Site Capital Improvement Items, for possible funding in CY2000 and beyond: Phone System Replacement - replace obsolete and inadequate system Housing & Storage - need more storage space and visitor housing Vehicle - replace worn-out vehicle Lightning Abatement Systems - add lightning warning system Mirror Coating Facility - to enable recoating primary mirror at site APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 327 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