Apache Point Observatory 3.5m User's Committee Meeting ****************December 8, 1997********************** Attending: Chris Stubbs, Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, Rene Walterbos, Alan Uomoto, Ed Turner Absent: Ed Kibblewhite, Jeff Secker Agenda: Outcome of BoG meeting Director's Discretionary Time policies Status of new secondary project Priorities and projects for 2nd year of three year plan Echelle status Miscellaneous *****Outcome of Board meeting: Gillespie, Turner, Walterbos were there. Very positive outcome. Basically, proposed spending proposal and operations budget were approved. The proposal for Director's Discretionary time was approved. Averaged over a year or two, DD time cannot be larger than 20% minus the fraction of engineering time (but excluding long shutdowns for routine maintenance, e.g., re-aluminization) and cannot in any case exceed 8% of total telescope time. This is will go into effect in second quarter of 1998. Turner will use the time devoted to engineering in the previous quarter to decide on amount of time for director's discretion for each quarter. The User's Committee members have copies of the viewgraphs and presentations made to the board; contact them if you are interested in seeing them. There are plans to set up a series of meetings to discuss long-term topics, such as instrumentation plans. The Board is looking into possibilities of long-term funding for upgrades: instruments, etc. Board believes that the User's Committee is a successful mechanism for communication with the user community. But we should all work harder to improve communication with our colleagues; it is not clear whether the User's Committee is the perfect conduit for communication between the mountain and the users of the telescope. *******Director's Discretionary time: We should all start thinking about the types of things we might do with this time. Stubbs has put together some thoughts on a structure in which we might work. Ed Turner is open to creative suggestions on what sort of programs might be carried out during DD time. Queue scheduling on short time scales: say, put aside a week on which a select number (say, half-dozen) people are on-call, to be ready to observe "at a moment's notice" if conditions are good. UW is already doing this at a low level: one group gets 45 minutes every other night for SN spectroscopy and photometry. If there are no SN up on a given night, the time reverts to previously scheduled UW time. But this won't work in the long term, as UW time is not always scheduled in this way. To make it work in the long term would require such a program to be observatory-wide Stubbs: Although given our instrumental flexibility and remote observing, we are superbly positioned for such "unschedulable" projects as SN and gamma-ray burst follow-up, we do not have the political mechanisms in place to do so. Such questions as: who takes the data? Who "owns" the data? Are people willing to be bumped off the telescope for such programs? These need to be answered. Stubbs has written a document describing a possible approach to such programs; we will discuss it in detail at the next meeting. ********Status of the New Secondary: Steward Observatory Mirror Lab is figuring 2ndary. We need to provide a holding cell to support it during polishing. SDSS 2ndary was done this way and it worked out well. So they are sending us the holding cell used for that mirror; we'll rebuild it for our 2ndary (which is a bit smaller). Swales Aerospace will do the relevant engineering and a lot of the hardware work. It will go to Steward mid-February, about 1.5 months late. Steward apparently is happy with this slippage, but the contract may need to be rewritten to reflect new delays. We need to think through how this effects the 3-year plan budget. The group of people who is active in the 3-year plan will soon meet to discuss this. **********Priorities and projects for 2nd year of three year plan Among the projects which face us (not a complete list): Automatic tertiary rotation. Routine archiving of engineering data on telescope from various sensors. Baffling DIS improvements software r0 telescope closed-loop guiding remote control of the mirror cover There is a general sense that those projects which improve performance of the telescope (e.g., DIS improvements, baffling, etc) take higher priority than do those that improve its efficiency. However, the telescope is performing well enough these days that there is now increasing push from the users for increased efficiency. When Echelle arrives, it will live at its own Nasmyth port. Thus the tertiary needs to rotate. Keeping everything in alignment on this rotation is not doable at the moment. Getting this rotator working and automated is a very non-trivial problem; Stubbs estimates 6 months to a year of work. Might we borrow from the WIYN telescope experience? Alan Uomoto is thinking through the DIS chip upgrade. Getting some Advanced Camera chips is a real possibility; more difficult is getting people together to get dewars, electronics in place. He and Chris Stubbs are discussing this. *********Echelle status There is a report from Roger Hildebrand on progress with the echelle in Chicago. We discussed possible impacts on the site of the commissioning of this major new instrument. Gillespie and Turner are making efforts to make detailed plans with the Chicago folks for the arrival of this instrument. *******Miscellaneous User Feedback Gillespie: We should think about having a Web-based form for observers to fill out at the end of the night, like Kitt Peak. People are very happy to see the impressions of the observers now appear on the nightly report, but the Observing Specialists are not too happy about having to bug observers for these, and the observers are not too happy about being bugged. Network connections to APO have been degraded due to problems at NMSU. Now trying to tune things up; the mountain staff would appreciate feedback on your experiences with the network connection. Stubbs: There are still some glitches in the guider, where we don't understand what it is doing. This needs to be worked out. There is some upcoming engineering time to fix this. Previous month's minutes are approved. Next meeting, January 5, 1997, 12:30 PM APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 221 in the apo35-general archive. 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