Apache Point Observatory 3.5m User's Committee Meeting January 8, 2001 Attending: Bruce Gillespie, Jon Holtzman, Ed Turner, Michael Strauss, Alan Uomoto, Rene Walterbos, Lew Hobbs Not attending: Chris Stubbs ********************Scientific Productivity************************* As reported in previous meetings, this past year has seen substantially fewer publications based on 3.5m data than previous years. The members of the user's committee polled the users at each of their institutions to understand why this was. Strauss: Princeton finds itself doing fine in terms of publication. We all certainly got less science out due to the extended shutdown in Fall 1999. DIS users would like coverage blueward of 3800, and more wavelength coverage in high-resolution mode. The big issue we discussed was the fragmentation of time. Scheduling in quarters means that the equivalent of three nights per semester is only 1.5 nights. This often gets chopped up into half-nights scattered around, and people find themselves working at low efficiency, especially if they are used to observing runs of three contiguous full nights, as one gets when observing at Kitt Peak. Another advantage of full nights is calibration efficiency; it is much easier, for example, to determine a photometric solution if you have a full night to get standard stars. The following are some of the comments that came up in our discussion of this issue. People do find half-nights convenient if their objects are in one area of sky, and for monitoring programs of all sorts. We should emphasize again to the users that if people need full nights, they should ask for them explicitly! In any case, Turner has made a greater effort this quarter to give people full nights (unless they explicitly asked for half-nights), and to make contiguous allocations of time to a particular person. He has not yet heard back from people whether they see this as an improvement. Note that internally to each institution, people could ask: give me three full nights this *semester*; I promise not to apply for time next quarter. Another problem is that we've got the telescope rather fragmented among many users; each person simply has too little time! It would be interesting to see what the distribution of actual time allocated per astronomer over a year is. Suppose there is a minimum threshhold of, say, 4 nights of telescope time to gather enough data to produce one paper, and if we've got 200 projects each with 1.5 nights, then no-one will be able to write a paper at the end of a year! Gillespie will think about putting together these statistics, and see where we stand. It would be useful to have more information on the web about standard calibration data (response curves, standard arc lamp spectra). Note that the SDSS is measuring the extinction on every night, and this information may be of real use; see http://astro.princeton.edu:81/sdss-hogglog/INDEX.html for nightly extinction values, and http://hoggpt.apo.nmsu.edu/ for more detail (access restricted to those at SDSS institutions). People are frustrated by the ability to do photometric calibration; improvements in baffling which are now underway will help a lot. Instrumentation: a lower-noise chip, and auto-guiding, would improve things a lot on echelle. More generally, there was a consensus that we need more modern instrumentation (no surprise!). ***********************An innovative proposal from JHU************** The HETE satellite will give precise positions for gamma-ray bursts, minutes after they go off. Glazebrook and colleagues wish to use this information to get echelle spectra of these objects (which, at least in one case, is known to have gotten to 9th mag a minute after the burst). Thus when a HETE detection came up (automatically e-mailed), the telescope would be usurped, the instrument would be switched to echelle, and an exposure (or several?) would be taken. We did not know details about exactly the criteria to observe an object: presumably it has to be in the right area of sky, with some selection for the brighter objects; Glazebrook expects about one appropriate object every two or three months. We also didn't know whether one quick exposure would be taken, or a series of exposures to trace the object as it fades. These objects fade very rapidly (magnitudes per minute), so time is of the essence. The scientific payoff is quite large, of course; no-one knows what the initial spectra of these objects are like. However, people will be quite upset to have their observing time taken from them, literally in the middle of an exposure. Needless to say, we need to give ample warning to everybody that this might happen. We also need a way to compensate people for lost time. It was suggested that people who have their time interrupted at all get a full half-night in compensation. This time could come from DD time, or random JHU nights sprinkled throughout the quarter, or nights randomly taken from other JHU programs. This is going to take some real discussion to find the least painful solution. This is the sort of thing that the telescope is optimized for, to be sure. No matter what we do, we're going to annoy some people. In any case, Glazebrook is going to APO today to discuss options with the observing staff there (as they will be the ones to carry out this program. There was some discussion last meeting about trying to minimize the number of people who forget about their observing runs. Craig Loomis is putting together an automated e-mail system that sends out an e-mail to the PI 48 hours in advance reminding them of their time, and asking them to finalize their setup, etc. Ed Turner is contemplating adding a line to the application form in which you would indicate the e-mail address to which this reminder would go. No comments on last month's minutes. Next meeting, February 12, 11:30 AM East Coast time. APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 483 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