APO User's Meeting meeting, December 7, 2009 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Jon Fulbright, John Bally, Al Harper, Jon Holtzman, Michael Strauss, Scott Anderson; apologies if I missed your name! There was no specific telescope feedback from any of the institutions. The telescope report from Mark Klaene is included at the end of these minutes. The big news is the heavy snow that hit the observatory last week; just as the observatory has recovered from this, it was hit by a wide-spread power outage that is now resolved. The snow outage reminds us that we should have a procedure to contact observers (especially if they are planning to travel to the telescope!) if the site is closed/inaccessible due to extreme weather. Agile has no guider. Tracking tests show good performance now with the new drive motors and axis controllers, approx. 3" drift in an hour with no guiding. However some science applications require precision photometry beyond the ability to flatfield, and hence want the object to be stationary on the same pixel(s). The performance at NA2 indicates that we are able to track within about one pixel for an hour when guiding. We are looking into guiding off the science images themselves on Agile. We then turned to a discussion of the potential new instruments: an upgrade for the echelle, a replacement or refurbishing of SPICAM, and a high-resolution near-IR spectrograph (FIRST) to be used for Doppler planet searches around cool stars. We started with input from each institution. Princeton (Strauss): A postdoc, Cullen Blake, is quite interested in the echelle upgrade, and has already contacted Burgh with specific questions about the detector. He has also contacted Jian Ge to get more details about FIRST. JHU (Fulbright): There is enthusiasm about getting greater blue response in the echelle, and less fringing in the red. There is some concern about separation of the orders in the echelle. Could FIRST be used to follow up interesting APOGEE targets? Colorado (Bally): Colorado folks are interested in using the upgraded echelle for studies of OVV quasars. In the contact of FIRST, they are building a laser-cooled calibration system with a frequency comb; they are in contact with Ge. Chicago (Harper): Don York has a series of concerns about management risks for the echelle (are all the individuals needed to carry out this program lined up? Are those who built the instrument in the first place properly in the loop?), as well as the amount of downtime for the instrument. Al suggested a telecon between the individuals most interested in this instrument, to talk about all aspects of it. NMSU (Holtzman): There is interest in the echelle and imager. Washington (Anderson): Low-level interest in all three instruments. Virginia wasn't represented at this meeting. Suzanne Hawley then led a broader discussion of the instruments, from the point of view of the observatory. Of the three, the echelle program is the most focussed and manageable. We're eager to move forward. It may possibly be fundable fully from CIF funds. We need to identify a PI. Given the timescales to put together a real budget/plan/PDR, it is unlikely therefore that the work could happen during the 2010 Summer shutdown, especially given that we don't have all that much money available for this. For the imager, the scientific motivation for going from a 5' to 10' field isn't very strong. What we need is a more reliable, maintainable instrument than SPICAM, that allows us to continue using our very good selection of filters. People are definitely interested in the idea of getting simultaneous multi-band imaging, using dichroics to image onto multiple CCDs. But such an instrument would be more expensive than CIF funds alone could cover. For the FIRST instrument, Jian Ge has a silicon immersion grating, and a 2K Hawaii chip in hand. The design for the instrument is still in the "qualitative" stage. Osterman and Bally of Colorado are putting together a list of desiderata of what would be needed for this instrument to go to PDR. One of the action items was to document triple-spec reductions for measuring spatial information. Adam Ginsberg (Colorado) has written some relevant scripts/code here; he and the UVa folks should talk to each other. The next meeting of this group will be at 11:30 AM Eastern, Monday, January 11. **************************************************************************** 3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 11/4/09 through 12/3/09 Mark Klaene 0) Overview We are making plans to install 5 more beds in the dormitories to handle additional people sharing rooms as NSO/SP housing starts drying up. On 11/30 we received the largest snowfall I have seen, with accumulation around 24" of snow. Power was lost due to the weather and 2 generator problems. We also lost the phone due to a control chassis failure. Network was down for around 24 hours and we had 2 underground water leaks develop. Needless to say it was a hectic week. 1) Telescope Telescope has been running well. We are continuing to characterize and adjust controller logic as time and weather permits. 2) Instruments DIS, Echelle, SPIcam, Agile and TripleSpec ran with only occasional minor problems. 3) CIF projects With 2010 funding approved these projects will start going ahead in January. 4) Personnel Nick MacDonald has moved to Seattle and will be working at the UW splitting time between the 3.5m and SDSS-III on mechanical design projects. Bill Ketzeback is now on full time day staff as the 3.5m Telescope Engineer. 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