APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 7/13/09 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Ed Turner (for Michael Strauss), Jon Fulbright, Mark Klaene, Russet McMillan, John Bally, Bruce Gillespie Absent: Scott Anderson, Michael Strauss, Al Harper, Jon Holtzman, Remy Indebetouw ********************************** User feedback, comments from institutional representatives: Princeton (Ed Turner) - Ed had not heard of any user comments. Colorado (John Bally) - No general user comments, but John Stocke asked if a tip-tilt capability was being considered as part of the visible-light imager upgrade. Suzanne said that it was not part of the landscape for the imager upgrade at this point; tip-tilt options for the telescope and instrument had been considered extensively in recent years, and the cost-benefit arguments were not compelling. We are looking at the QUOTA camera from WIYN which uses orthogonal transfer arrays and provides similar tip-tilt correction. Bruce Woodgate is studying tip-tilt as a possible option on upgrades to the Goddard Fabry-Perot, and John said he would contact Bruce to see where he was. Johns Hopkins (Jon Fulbright) - Jon had not heard any comments from JHU users. Washington (Suzanne Hawley) - Things are basically fine. UW users are looking into the Agile dome-flats issue. Chicago (Al Harper) - No report. New Mexico State (Jon Holtzman) - No report. Virginia (Remy Indebetouw) - No report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report: Regarding the more detailed report below, Mark said that weather was a major factor in observing success recently; we had unusually wet weather in late June, but the conditions have surprisingly dried out and observing has resumed. Another activity worth mentioning is the influx of SDSS-III BOSS people, who are on site making preparations for the hardware and software upgrades for BOSS during the summer. For the telescope performance, things have been generally pretty good. During the June mini-shutdown, which went well, the new altitude drive controller was installed and tested. Tuning is still underway but the performance so far is very good, for which Fritz Stauffer deserves considerable credit. Agile was moved to the TR2 port with its own dedicated rotator and 3-inch filter wheel. There is still some cleanup to do, but Agile is operational at its new permanent station. For instruments, SPIcam, the echelle, and NIC-FPS are all functioning well. There have been minor problems with the DIS vacuum system; new ion pumps have been ordered, and a long-term solution to the DIS vacuum maladies are under research. The formal acceptance and handover of TripleSpec is moving forward, albeit slowly. Extensive work has been done to study stray light issues in Agile (see later topic, this meeting), and we are modifying its filter mount to accept 2-inch filters. APOLLO observing has been generally fine. The CIF projects arena is focussed on completion and installation of the direct drives for altitude and azimuth. The drive assemblies are in the final phases of machining, and are expected at APO next week, which is close to the original schedule. The big summer shutdown for their installation is slated to begin 10 August. ************************* 3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 6/04/09 through 7/7/09 Mark Klaene 0) Overview The monsoon rains arrived a little early this year, around June 15th-- we have already received four inches of rain for the season. Naturally, we have experienced more lost observing time because of the increased cloud cover, precipitation, and high humidity. The SDSS BOSS group has also arrived en masse to start spectrograph and software integration; this will continue to tax our on-site housing resources throughout the summer. The primary and tertiary mirrors were washed during the short shutdown this week. 1) Telescope Telescope operations have been generally smooth, with some significant progress accomplished during the June engineering time. This includes the installation of the new altitude axis controller, and the move of Agile to its permanent mount on the TR2 port. The transition to the new axis controller has gone better than we could have hoped for. Fritz Stauffer's hard work on this, and the prior integration of the NA2 and TR2 axes, paid off. This will yield a major improvement in long-term maintainability of the telescope and eliminates a concern we have had for years with respect to failure of the old obsolete drive controllers. In addition, the new controllers are paving the way for the direct-drive motors with their promise of improved pointing and tracking performance. 2) Instruments SPIcam, Echelle and NIC-FPS have been operational with no problems. The high-frequency pattern noise on SPIcam reported last month seems to have subsided. The DIS ion vacuum pumps have given us some trouble during this period, but we have been able to keep the instrument operational. For TripleSpec, we are starting to make progress again on the instrument acceptance documentation. Currently the digital slit mask is slightly off and we are waiting for available time to generate a new one. Agile is operational on TR2. The current status of the dome flats are under discussion and the instrument baffling is less than ideal--sky flats are an acceptable alternative. There are a number of small clean-up items remaining, most of which have to do with operational issues like filter wheel handling, balance, homing, and zeroing--these are being addressed as time permits. We also hope to have the 2-inch filter option back soon. The APOLLO laser system is operational. 3) CIF projects The direct-drive project is well on its way to having all of the telescope parts at the site by late July. Machining schedules are very tight, but we are still on course for installation during the summer shutdown, scheduled for Aug 10-Sep 6. The new azimuth drive controller is being developed and initial testing has begun. ********************************** Update on recent July engineering work (Klaene): Mark reported that the APO engineering staff successfully washed M1 and M3, and the new hardware for the altitude and azimuth drive controllers was installed and tested. All three telescope motions (alt, az, and rotators) are now running on new controllers, which is a major accomplishment and removes our dependency and risk related to the old controllers that were obsolete and unmaintainable. Also, the M3 rotation logic has been modified so that the tertiary mirror moves more quickly between the primary science ports. Some improvements to the tertiary mirror tip-tilt adjustments are being explored. ********************************** Agile dome flats at the TR2 port (Hawley): At its new TR2 port, Agile dome flats show significant scattered light. Sky flats appear to be OK, but on-sky tests near the moon have not yet been carried out. Recent tests have suggested several ways to improve the dome flats by identifying sources of scattered light and changing the instrument baffling. These are under investigation. We are also considering building a library of good dome flats and sky flats for Agile users. In the meantime, users should not use dome flats for science, and should instead obtain sky flats. We also will appreciate user feedback on their flats and science data. ********************************** Improvements in FITS headers (Hawley): There are 2 issues with FITS headers to discuss. First, the headers have until recently contained incorrect gain and read noise parameters for the DIS red chip, being the parameters from the old CCD. These were replaced with the proper parameters for the new red CCD (which was installed in Dec 2006) in late June and are now correct in the DIS FITS headers. Second, LST entries in the headers were not correct for the start of the exposure time. This bug has apparently existed for at least the past 10 years. If data has LST written in scientific notation, it should not be trusted. The LST is now written in sexagesimal notation (HHMMSS) and is accurate to within a second of the exposure start time. Note that the UT times written in the headers have always been correct, and if users need LSTs for older exposures, they can obtain them via manual computations based on the other data in the headers. Committee members should make sure that their users know that these changes in the FITS headers have been made. We appreciate the feedback from several users recently which led to us uncovering and fixing these issues. ********************************** Update on imaging camera and echelle upgrade studies (Hawley): Cynthia Froning and Eric Burgh (both at CU) are heading up the studies for an optical imager and echelle spectrograph upgrade, respectively. Cynthia provided the following update on the imager study: Chris Burrows has been hired as a consultant and he has completed a preliminary optical design for a camera that covers a 10 arcmin FOV with no vignetting at 0.35 arcsec/pixel sampling. We are currently using this baseline design to evaluate the trade space with regard to field of view, spatial sampling, and broadband and narrowband performance versus complexity and cost. Our next steps will be to extend the study to evaluating the feasibility of placing a camera at the TR1 port rather than NA2 and examining the cost vs. performance enhancements of expanding to a camera that provides simultaneous multicolor imaging in multiple channels. We plan to complete this work over the next two months. Suzanne mentioned that the QUOTA camera from WIYN is also under consideration during the imager study. Eric Burgh provided this update on the echelle study: Still hunting down current component level efficiencies for the detector, grating, and optics. Need these for adequate comparison to new components. Received quote from Newport for an echelle grating with better efficiency that could replace the current one. Am still looking into quotes for AR coatings for the optics, as well as for the CCDs. Don York is sending a large stack of echelle documentation to APO which may be helpful. Also, John Bally said that he recently discussed the echelle with Dale Sanford from Yerkes/UChicago who was involved in the building of the echelle. He will put Dale and Eric in touch. ********************************** Shutdown status & plans (Klaene): Mark reminded the committee that the main summer shutdown starts on 10 August. The main event is to replace the altitude and azimuth drive systems with direct-drive motors. Users should be aware that with the usual summer weather vagaries, returning the telescope for science observing is tricky to schedule--we might be early, on schedule, or late. Suzanne said that she will monitor the shutdown progress closely, and will alert the institutional schedulers if there is a need for programs to add if we finish the shutdown early, and will notify affected users if we are delayed in finishing the engineering work. ********************************** Date for next meeting (Hawley): As we traditionally do, we will skip August. The next Users Committee telecon will be on 14 September at the usual time (8:30am PDT). ********************************** Miscellaneous topics: o Suzanne mentioned that there are several postdocs at UW who need to have their training orientation trip to APO. If other institutions have a similar situation, they should contact her to see if a pan- institutional postdoc-training program could be tried out. Bruce said such a program should be advertised APO-wide, and he wondered if it might be possible to block some contiguous nights of telescope time for this purpose. Suzanne said there are various scheduling possibilities if we know ahead of time (by the previous quarter) who/how many would be participating. o Ed Turner asked the committee if anyone had any comments about endorsing NMSU's request for ARC participation in the SONG proposal (SONG is the stellar equivalent of the GONG project). There were no objections from the attendees. ********************************** ACTION ITEMS: [open from previous months]: none [new actions from this meeting]: none ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday, 14 September (no meeting in August), at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. 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 1139 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