This will probably only be of interest to the spectroscopists out there: The Bright Quartz lamps at APO have been upgraded to much brighter quartz lamps. The user interface is unchanged- the new lamps will come on when the bright quartz are selected off the lamp control web page. The old bright quartz are no longer available (the dim quartz lamps are still available, and are unchanged). The new lamps are approximately 10 times brighter at the blue end of the DIS blue chip, and about 5.5 times brighter at the red end of the red chip. They are also about 6 times brighter in the H and K filters of GRIM. The lamps have been vented in the telescope exhaust system to alleviate any additional heat in the enclosure (although no lasting effect was detected during the GRIM tests). So, if you use the bright quartz lamps for spec. flats, you can (& need) to cut your exposure times to 1/6th to 1/10th the previous value! A big thanks to Dave Woods at APO for taking the lead in obtaining and installing these new lamps. Any questions, please feel free to contact me or Dave Woods. -Bernadette APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 323 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