APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 3/8/10 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Bill Ketzeback, John Bally, Michael Strauss, Jon Holtzman, Remy Indebetouw Absent: Al Harper, Jon Fulbright, Scott Anderson ********************************** User feedback, comments from institutional representatives: New Mexico State (Jon Holtzman) - nothing to report (too cloudy). Colorado (John Bally) - nothing to report Princeton (Michael Strauss) - nothing to report Virginia (Remy Indebetouw) - nothing to report, users happy. Washington (Suzanne Hawley) - a beta version of TUI that allows Agile on-chip guiding is about ready to be tested by UW users. Others who are interested in testing should contact Suzanne. Also, re: cloudy weather, OPEN and DD time can be requested for critical programs that get weathered out (e.g. for graduate student thesis data). Quite a bit of the OPEN/DD time has gone to such programs in the past few months. Chicago (Al Harper) - no report (absent) Johns Hopkins (Jon Fulbright) - no report (absent) ********************************* Discussion of telescope/instruments report - Klaene There was some discussion of snow removal. We use several methods including the snow program, roof heaters, and manual shoveling. Which is used depends on conditions, powder verses ice and wet snow. The snow program works well for powder, while wet snow requires sun and manual shoveling. Ice on the lightning arrestors has hurt us twice this month. Danger of this ice falling into the open shutter is our biggest concern and there is no way to manually remove the ice since the arrestors are quite tall and located at the corners of the roof. Usually the ice clears with a few hours of sunshine and/or ambient temps in the high 20s. The roof heaters have limited value and can cause other problems. Added 5 new beds (singles) in a few dorm rooms to accomodate extra housing demands due to reduced availability of housing at Sunspot. Sunspot/NSO housing is likely going away completely by summer because new development folks working on ATST are spending a few years at Sunspot before going to Hawaii. The telescope should not be slewed with the covers closed. It is still okay to do cals with covers closed while the telescope is tracking. Bally asked about 2010 weather statistics. From SDSS they reported loss time in January due to weather at 55%, which is quite a bit higher than usual for the winter months. ****************** 3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 2/3/10 through 3/3/10 0) Overview Weather, specifically snow, has been the main issue again this period and winter is not quite over. Recent storms have been more moderate and caused significantly less problems although we continue to spend over 2 man days a week dealing with weather related issues. This now includes 3 roof leaks. Loss time due to snow on the roof increased somewhat because of icing of the roof mounted lightning arrestors. The arrestors are impossible to reach and clear and thus we must have some warming to clear these. The concern with ice on the arrestors is that it can easily fall into the open shutter and onto the optics. Remodeling of the dormitories was accomplished to add 5 more beds. 1) Telescope Behavior has been quite good with only rare minor issues with pointing and tracking. A couple of servo errors were seen during slews and tracked to a software bug in the controller in handling magnasensor crossings. Slewing with the mirror covers closed also causes rare servo errors, we have not seen any problems while tracking with the mirror covers closed. This resulted in a minor procedure change. 2) Instruments Echelle and Agile ran with no problems. DIS blue warmed unexpectedly, and SPICam was running warming than normal by 10-20 deg K. Vacuum was checked on both cameras and found to be OK. Both cryotigers were recharged to a higher pressure based on discussions with the Polycold technicians. The new pressure is higher than their manual suggested for these ambient temperatures but appears to have fixed the problem. TSpec ICC power supply failed, taking out numerous boards in the chassis. An SDSS spare chassis was assembled and UVa folks reinstalled the software returning TSpec to normal operation. Fortunately the PCIA Interface was okay. The spare is at CU. New chassis has been procured and we plan to replace the power supply in the slitviewer ICC. The DIS slitviewer camera shutter continues to have occasional cold weather problems. We are monitoring this for increasing frequency but so far it has not re-occurred. Observing Specialist are running the shutter prior to start of observing when possible. The new NICFPS fanout board testing is progressing at CU. Initial testing with the spare Leach controller yielded unexpected results. They have moved to the Rockwell controller and obtained more consistent data. Once testing with the Rockwell controller is complete they will revisit the issue with the spare Leach controller. Installation is still possible for March or April. There was still no progress reported on the NICFPS etalon at CU. 3) CIF projects The spare drive box machining and fabrication is in work. A preliminary vibration study was also conducted and is being analyzed. We plan to perform additional testing this month. On chip guiding software development for Agile is progressing and initial testing is planned for later this month. ********************************** o Q2 schedule and class trips - Hawley The Q2 schedule was just released yesterday (3/7/10). There are no class trips planned for Q2 according to the proposals that were scheduled. If anyone is planning a large trip, they should let us know immediately. Also, we need to be notified about trips that are planned for Q3 (July-Sept) as soon as possible, since we will be coordinating with summer shutdowns and SDSS work on the mountain. o TUI versions - Klaene There was a question about when the version of TUI being used by an observer needs to be updated. The plan is that a new field will be added that will come up when TUI is started so that the version is available for the user and the Observing Specialist to see. If it is out of date, this field will appear in some bright color (possibly red). In general, users should try to update their version of TUI to the newest version within a few months of its release. The version history available at: http://www.apo.nmsu.edu/35m_operations/TUI/index.html gives the updates. Note that the current (latest) version is TUI 1.7.0. Changes in the second digit (currently "7") indicate a fairly major update that should be installed quickly, while changes in the third digit (currently "0") are minor updates often for a particular instrument. The new python libraries needed for this update from 1.6.2 to 1.7.0 can be somewhat problematic to install on linux machines. o Possible visiting instrument: RITMOS - Hawley RITMOS is a multi-object spectrograph built as a prototype instrument for a 24" telescope and is presently available to go on a bigger telescope. It would need some new front end optics. The FOV on the 3.5m would likely be quite small, about 2'x1', similar to Agile and the GFP. We would like to know if users would be interested. There is a published SPIE paper (Meyer et al 2004 SPIE 5492, 200) that describes the instrument which has been sent to the users committee members. Massimo Robberto at STScI is the person who is leading this effort, because of his interest in building a multi-object spectrograph, perhaps for the 3.5m, that uses this technology. o Note added in proof - Hawley After the meeting finished, a new problem was discovered with the SPIcam cryotiger. The instrument will be offline until May. Updates will be sent to apo35-general. ***************************** ACTION ITEMS: [open from previous months]: NONE [new actions from this meeting]: Users committee members should ask their users if RITMOS is of interest to them (please share SPIE paper). ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday, 5 April, 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 1174 in the apo35-general archive. 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