Apache Point Observatory 3.5m User's Committee Meeting June 28, 1999 Attending: Ed Turner, Scott Austin, Rene Walterbos, Bruce Gillespie, Michael Strauss **********************Miscellaneous Announcements****************** Observers who have requests of special filters, gratings, daytime calibrations, etc. for their observations *must* let the technical staff (techstaff@galileo.apo.nmsu.edu) know at least 24 hours in advance. People have been cutting things too close recently. Some grating, slit, and filter changes can take an hour or two. If configuration change requests come in at the last minute, the site staff cannot guarantee that science observing will start on schedule. Please send copies of any news articles about the 3.5m, the SDSS, or any science based on either of these to Gretchen (gretchen@galileo.apo.nmsu.edu), who is keeping a file of these things. SPICAM is down; currently the electronics is in Seattle for repair. They have not yet been able to reproduce the fault seen on the mountain. UPDATE: Today, some problems with the electronics were noticed in Seattle. Peter Doherty is replacing and/or upgrading much of the electronics, and expects to have Spicam back in service by about 7 July. There is time scheduled in early July for commissioning of the Shack-Hartman optical testing device, with the intention of getting a baseline of our optical performance, before the summer shutdown, and the installation of the new secondary. The new secondary has arrived on the mountain, and has been formally accepted. We have not yet successfully found a replacement for Camron Hastings. We do have a fairly rich pool of applicants, and are looking for someone who will stay with us for several years. We will be interviewing further people in the next week or so. The job description is posted on the AAS job register and on the APO Web pages. WSMR has terminated its agreement with us (as of the end of June). So we have lost the income that generated. But there is interest from the military in a possible new arrangement to use the 3.5m. ***********************Twilight Time****************************** Since the beginning of operations on the 3.5m, there has been a policy that twilight time is "owned" by the observatory for engineering and preparatory work. In actual fact, most people have worked under the assumption that twilight is owned by the adjacent program (thus the evening twilight is owned by the first program of the night). Operationally, this is how twilight is being used on the vast majority of nights. Perhaps we should explicitly start accounting for it, or at least we should be explicit that this is the policy. Might monitoring programs, scheduled right at the beginning or the end of the night, work into twilight, especially when there is some moon (when the practical difference between 18 degree and 12 degree twilight is minimal)? Comments and opinions on this should be forwarded to Ed Turner and Bruce Gillespie. ***********************The Next 3-year Plan************************* The three years of the original three-year plan are coming to an end soon, with great progress made on essentially all the items we wished to address. It is now time to start listing what major capital improvements we'd like to propose to the Board for the year 2000 budget, and giving them priorities. Among the items mentioned: The new Kibblewhite top end, which will allow tip-tilt, etc. New rotators and guiders for the various ports, to take advantage of the rotation of the tertiary for faster instrument changes. Operating software upgrade. An aluminizing facility for the site. At one point, it was suggested that we build a traveling facility, but this is probably not feasible. It may cost as much as $1 million, to be shared between the 3.5m and SDSS, and used by other observatories in the area. Building new storage buildings on the site. The site needs other infrastructure work, like a new phone system. Various instrument projects. Among the various instrument projects under consideration or development, and visitor instruments that may become user instruments in the future, are the following: 1. Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter (narrow-band infrared imager), a visitor instrument that has been used a number of times. It should be relatively straightforward to make it a broad-band imager, to replace GRIM. 2. DIS chip upgrades, led by Stubbs' team at UW. 3. Stubbs; Large-format imaging CCD camera. 4. Sean Casey's InSb infrared imager. A potential GRIM replacement. 5. Woodgate's Fabry-Perot, and Lyot filter; potential user instruments. 6. There are some further things that need to be done on the echelle. 7. Chicago/JHU instrument, as yet unspecified. 8. Kibblewhite's Chaos instrument (adaptive optics). 9. Optical Fourier-Transform spectrometer from Livermore. The highest priorities are the DIS upgrade, and something to replace GRIM. We need more details, and a sense of how much each of this will cost the observatory. It would be good to discuss these issues at an APO community meeting. We suggested doing this at Sunspot, in late September or early October. Next meeting: 12 noon, Monday, July 19. Previous month's minutes are approved. APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 357 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