APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 12/06/10 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Michael Strauss, Bill Ketzeback, Russet McMillan, Remy Indebetouw, Scott Anderson, John Bally, Al Harper, Sean Moran, Jon Holtzman, Bruce Gillespie Absent: None ********************************** User feedback, comments from institutional representatives: o Chicago (Al Harper) - Al had nothing to report. o New Mexico State (Jon Holtzman) - Jon had nothing to report. o Washington (Scott Anderson) - Scott had nothing to report. o Colorado (John Bally) - John has heard no comments except from one user regarding the recent problem with the secondary motion controls. o Princeton (Michael Strauss) - Michael said the PU users are happy, no complaints. Their one NIC-FPS user has no plans for using the instrument in the upcoming quarter. o Johns Hopkins (Sean Moran) - Sean had nothing to report. o Virginia (Remy Indebetouw) - Remy had nothing to report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report - Klaene: Mark made note of the recent spate of good observing weather at APO. He highlighted the reexamination of humidity closure limits and humidity-sensing equipment upgrades, which have led to a recent change in closure limits to allow a slightly smaller dew point depression (but only when the humidity is stable). In addition, new humidity-sensing equipment is being obtained that should enable us to stay open even closer to the dew point. After some discussion, there seemed to be a consensus that the amount of time we are closed due to humidity under clear skies is a few percent of the year, and is especially concentrated in the summer monsoon period. The new procedures and sensing equipment should help reduce this somewhat. The Agile instrument rotator problem was tracked down and fixed. DIS is performing well, but we've recently had a recurrence of the sticky slit-view camera shutter when cold -- we put in the spare shutter and are buying a replacement. There was some condensation on the SPIcam detector, which disappeared after pumping on the dewar. Recent incidents of slit moves "not reporting" in TripleSpec were determined to be due to the slit not moving when commanded. Apparently this occurred for most of November, and was recently fixed. All affected Triplespec users were notified. There has been intermittent low-level banding in Echelle data. According to users who have reduced recent echelle data, the effects are removed during data reduction and are not affecting the final spectra. However, we are discussing the situation with Dale Sandford at Yerkes, who is planning a trip to APO next quarter to try and diagnose the problem. Finally, when NIC-FPS is rotated to angles greater than about 90 degrees, the data often becomes corrupted. When this happens the instrument can be reset to allow data collection to continue, but the problem often returns. The external electronics are being investigated as a possible cause, but we suspect that the problem is inside the dewar. ************************* 3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 10/6/10 through 12/01/10 0) Overview Lots of clear and dry weather. We have adjusted the humidity opening and closing limits slightly to provide more on-sky time with further improvements possible once new metrology is obtained and operational. Major issue this period has been NIC-FPS readout when rotated upside down. See below for more details. 1) Telescope The telescope was re-collimated by adjusting M1 and M2 positions allowing for a more nominal M2 position at the center of range. Agile rotator amplifier is occasionally going in to a low-torque mode. We found a ground loop problem, and while more testing is needed the problem has not reoccurred since this was fixed. We fought a lot of Miller moth debris on the drive discs towards the end of the moth season. Daily cleanings helped, but several times cleanings during the night were required. TCC version 2.14.0 was also implemented. 2) Instruments DIS is having cold temperature issues with the slitviewer shutter. A replacement shutter was reinstalled but is still having some intermittent failures when cold. SPICam was discovered to have some condensation on the detector. After vacuum pumping, it appears to all be gone. Issue with exposure times was resolved (see later agenda item). The Agile rotator still occasionally faults out due to insufficient torque. Ed discovered a ground loop and is currently running the rotator during the day to see if the problem repeats. A change to the umbilical retractor was also made to reduce the load on the rotator. TripleSpec appears to not be reporting slit moves correctly. They are reported correctly with a status but not during a move. We have asked the instrument team to look at this. Echelle started showing some banding in bias images. They show up intermittently and are now under investigation. NIC-FPS images often do not readout when the instrument is rotated past 90 degrees. Much testing has been done on all "outside the dewar" components and nothing has helped. We have pretty much isolated the problem to inside the dewar and are waiting for a response from CU on how to proceed. The instrument seems to be OK with limited rotation and recovery is quick although not always 100% effective. NIC-FPS is only available in a shared risk state at this time. ********************************** Instrument issues - Hawley: Suzanne, Jon, and Russet talked about some of the recent instrument issues and topics. It was recently confirmed that the SPIcam exposure times are not being correctly recorded -- the commanded and actual exposure times differ by 3/4 second; this has been the case since the summer of 2007. Craig and Fritz found the source of the problem, which occurred during the conversion to TUI, and it has been fixed as of the week of 11/22. Commanded and actual exposure times are now the same, and users who took SPIcam data in the '07 through '10 interval have been notified. Russet has double-checked that the correct exposure times are now getting written in the data headers. For NIC-FPS, we have the ongoing problem of high read noise, and the new fan-out board has yet to be installed. More recently, we have the unsolved problem of readout errors at upside-down rotation angles. Taken together, the NIC-FPS users need to be cognizant of these issues, and if they use the instrument it is on a shared-risk basis. The ARC Board of Governors were apprised of the current situation last month, and they endorsed the plan of taking the instrument out of service and sending it back to CU for repairs. The recent cluster of instrument problems shows the effects of equipment aging, and the need for next-generation instrumentation. We need ARC astronomers to come forward and lead initiatives for new instruments for the 3.5-m telescope. ********************************** Board meeting, futures discussion - Hawley: The ARC Board of Governors meeting went well, and the Board members were particularly impressed with the small amount of unscheduled down time in the past year (~21 hours). The flexibility that the facility afforded the users was also appreciated. The 2011 budget was unanimously approved. On the ARC Futures topic, four pre-proposals were received that involve the 3.5-meter, and nearly double that number were received for future 2.5-meter programs. Suzanne will convene a review team to look at the 3.5-meter pre-proposals to help decide how to proceed with them. ********************************** RestAR meeting, upcoming proposal deadline - Holtzman, Hawley: Jon attended the recent ReSTAR meeting in Tucson. There is NOAO interest in obtaining access to mid-sized telescopes for use by the national community. In the previous round of ReSTAR funding, arrangements were made for access to the Palomar 5-meter telescope, and Cornell was engaged to build a copy of TripleSpec for use by the national observatories. In this next phase of ReSTAR, NOAO is looking for proposals (due in a couple of months) from facilities that wish to team with NOAO to write a joint proposal to the NSF. Suzanne said that we've been musing for some time about selling observing time to NOAO if we needed funding, but it is not obvious that we need to pursue this path at this time. We can also imagine other long-term arrangements with NOAO that might be outside of the ReSTAR process -- this will be discussed further. ********************************** Guider images attached to spectra headers - McMillan, Bally: John Bally offered the idea of recording guide images in the headers (or FITS extensions) for DIS spectra. Russet pointed out that TripleSpec already writes a slit-view guider image with the spectrum. She felt that we could also do this for DIS and possibly Echelle. John added that he would be interested in the slit-viewer images, plus various keywords (such as guider status, etc.). Suzanne said that the APO staff will look into what is required to implement this for DIS. ********************************** Other business - group: Scott congratulated Suzanne for accepting the ARC Board's offer for a third term as the 3.5-meter Director. Jon said that he's been working on the echelle upgrade project, and he recently pinged the instrument development group at JHU for their assessments on some of the proposed upgrades. ********************************** ACTION ITEMS: [open from previous meeting]: ===> ACTION: Users Committee members should poll their users to find out how many are using TUI with Mac OS 10.4 and report at the next Users Committee meeting. STATUS: No affected users were identified; this action is CLOSED. [new actions from this meeting]: None. ********************************** Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday 31 January 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 1212 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