Apache Point Observatory 3.5m User's Committee Meeting ****************April 8, 1998********************** Attending: Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, Ed Turner, Jeff Brown, Chris Stubbs, Alan Uomoto Missing: Rene Walterbos, Ed Kibblewhite Agenda: Status of secondary polishing Recent visitor instruments Tertiary rotation Recruitment status Status of Echelle The night from hell *********Status of Secondary***** Uomoto: The secondary is leaving Swales with its polishing cell on Friday; arriving in Tucson w/ polishing cell on Monday, June 15. Schedule for starting polishing not yet clear. But we are holding our place in the queue. The schedule is for them to finish polishing 6-18 months after they receive the mirror. There has been a delay of shipping, on request of Steward, just because they didn't have floor space for it yet. They say they are ready for it now. There is some concern about our being ready to integrate the finished mirror into the telescope, could be in early 1999. We need some planning for this, possibly including the ability to do tip-tilt at 10 Hz or so. ***********Recent Visitor Instruments*********** Stubbs: Bruce Woodgate et al at Goddard has built a Fabry-Perot imaging instrument. This instrument has been on the telescope in the past; it has returned to APO, and had its first recent run on the telescope. Integrated well with telescope. Camera system looks a lot like SPICAM (2048^2 SITE chip, although only the central 1K^2 is illuminated). The front-end F-P filter is somewhat more complicated. The idea is that this instrument will live at APO (although occasionally traveling to other telescopes). Resolution is 350 km/s at H alpha, which is fairly broad as F-P's go; we could imagine buying some more narrow etalons in the future. It is sufficiently idiosyncratic that you really need to collaborate with the Goddard folks to use it; we'll see what happens down the line. There is as yet no manual for this instrument, and is not yet very user-friendly (and definitely not usable remotely yet!). It also requires of order 3-4 hours of calibrating per day (mostly daytime), etc. But people are excited about it. Uomoto: We are thinking about building an imaging instrument with a ramp filter; not nearly as narrow as a F-P, but it would have quite a bit higher throughput. Gillespie: An 1-5 micron imaging 1K^2 Aladdin array is coming to the mountain for commissioning, built by Sean Casey now at Moffet, but most recently at GSFC. He is collaborating with Kibblewhite (who may be interested in using this with ChAOS). *************Rotation of Tertiary Mirror************** Stubbs: Stubbs et al. have started detailed planning and design for this. Should be much more robust and repeatable than the current system; the pointing model is found to vary quite a bit when one returns to nominally the same place. Initial implementation will be manual, not automatic. More work to allow this to happen at any altitude at the telescope. Timescale is something like 6 months to get this going. The spec we're shooting for: 5 minutes to rotate from one instrument gathering photons to the next. **************Recruitment*********************** Gillespie: Camron Hasting has been engaged to work as an observing specialist this summer; he has already successfully solo'd for several nights. We might think about doing this in the future as well; having people come in every summer to give the full-time observing specialist to have a break. We have enough people to cover us until the shutdown, but are continuing to recruit to have full contingent of permanent Observing Specialist staff by August (i.e., three FTEs). ****************Echelle************************ Turner: Much communication between APO and Chicago. The original plan was to ship the instrument in mid-June; this will not happen. Delivery of second half of July is probably realistic. They will come out the week of June 22 to plan the arrival of the instrument in detail. Brown: They say that the instrument will not be available for general users in the 3rd quarter, as they will still be in commissioning. *************The night from hell**************** There was a night a week or so ago when *everything* went wrong (see http://galileo.apo.nmsu.edu/obs-reports/reports/1998-06-01.07:23:32.log). With heroic effort, the next night was fine, but Gillespie said that we don't have a clear idea of what all went wrong; a night to remind us that we still have some poorly understood telecommunication instabilities in the system that occasionally become manifest and recover without clearly understood intervention. Last month's minutes are approved. Next meeting, Monday, July 13, 12:30 PM APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 282 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