--============_-1143616866==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 11/10/03 Attending: Ed Turner, Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, John Bally (replacing Mike Shull), Rene Walterbos, Al Harper, Jon Holtzman, Bruce Balick, Russet McMillan Absent: Karl Glazebrook, Don York, Jim Green ********************************** General: After many years of selfless and dedicated service, Michael Strauss has accepted our offer to retire from taking the minutes, and starting this month Bruce Gillespie has agreed to take over this task. With great difficulty, we will strive to approach Michael's standards for turnaround speed and accuracy. Also, we are experimenting with the Princeton teleconference system for this meeting. It seemed to work quite adequately, so we will continue to use it for future meetings because it is considerably cheaper than the commercial AT&T teleconferencing service. ********************************** GRIM2 Problems: The "lost-quad" problem has returned, the second time in a about a month. The site staff have exhausted their means of trouble-shooting this problem using component swapping, and Al Harper is working to set up a site visit by Yerkes engineer Dale Sandford to diagnose and hopefully solve this problem. In the meantime, GRIM2 is unavailable for observing. Fortunately, there is very little scheduled use of GRIM2 through the end of this year, and the scheduled users of the instrument have been notified. ********************************** Board of Governors meeting preparations: A couple of institutions have sent recent science highlight to Ed, and there is room for other institutions to do the same. Rene Walterbos needs lists of 2003 APO 3.5-m-based publications, and in particular he needs reports of student activities that involve the telescope, which we believe to be extensive. A main topic for the Board meeting will be plans to acquire a NIR spectrograph. ********************************** SPIcam Upgrade Proposal: John Bally announced that he and Josh Wallender at CU are planning to design a "focal reducer" for SPIcam. The current thinking is to build a refractive (or possibly all-reflecting) optic that turns the telescope feed from f/10 to f/5, quadrupling the area of sky coverage, giving .28 arcsec/pixel sampling with no binning. It is possible that the initial implementation of this upgrade would be for Nasmyth, and ultimately a repackaged design would be mounted on a corner port, incorporating its own guider, rotator, and tip-tilt. There was some discussion about the advantages of tip-tilt efficacy over a medium-large field of view, but in general people were pretty enthusiastic about the general concept of making SPIcam a larger-field imager. John Bally should try talking to Chris Stubbs and Jeff Morgan about this, which is similar to an earlier concept they were exploring for a wide-field camera. Stray-light rejection may be a problem, unless there is a field stop at a pupil using the all-reflective focal reducer design. UWash engineering staff could be involved to help John with the design, especially in the recovery of as-built drawings of the current instrument. Several people expressed interest in using such an upgraded SPIcam for synoptic and narrow-band imaging, and John Bally is encouraged to bring forward a proposal and design for doing so. Is was mentioned that this upgrade is to go to a "medium-field" configuration, and is not really wide-field. SDSS (and maybe the NMSU 1-meter) are also resources that we can use for wide-field science programs. ********************************** CFH12K camera: Speaking of wide-field imagers, the CFHT has recently announced the availability (for sale, or in trade for telescope time) of its recently retired 12kx8K prime focus imager, which has been replaced by the larger MegaCam. If this instrument could be easily adapted for use on the 3.5-m at Nasmyth, it would have nearly ten times the sky coverage as SPIcam, although seriously over-sampled unless binning were used. A description of CFH12K can be found at: http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Instruments/Imaging/CFH12K/ There seemed to be no reason not to explore this opportunity, although the "devil is in the details." Ed and BruceG will continue the dialog with the CFHT. ********************************** NIC-FPS Status: John Bally reported that the dewar has passed some recent flexure testing, and the science-grade detector is in house. Plans include bringing the instrument to APO in the summer of 2004 for engineering tests, with science commissioning to follow. ********************************** Fill-in Program Proposal: Don York has proposed providing APO with an observing program of echelle MK standards and ISM variability monitoring targets, which would be used as a fill-in program by the Observing Specialists when conditions are unsuitable (e.g., seriously non-photometric and/or bad seeing) for the primary scheduled science program and the scheduled observer has no other suitable backup program available. This echelle fill-in program would only be invoked if the primary scheduled observer did not object. The group thought this would be a good idea to try as an experiment (although it was not clear how much time in a year would be used this way, maybe only a few hours). Don York should provide the Observing Specialists with a target list and observing instructions, after which the community would be informed about the experiment. If it works out, we could solicit more of these kinds of fill-in programs, but probably only run one at a time, for simplicity. ********************************** TUI (Telescope User Interface) Status: There is much informal "beta" use of TUI for DIS observer as of late, especially by NMSU and UWash observers. It seems to work quite well for DIS, but there are hard problems yet to solve for GRIM2 and the Echelle. The most recent version of TUI uses a new "hub" so users need to download the latest version. Some form of "release" plan will be developed shortly, hopefully by the developers, Russell Owen and Craig Loomis. [Shortly after the telecon, I received the following from Russell Owen: ".... Also, I would very much like folks to start using the new TUI mailing lists that Craig set up. Anybody using TUI now should subscribe to the announcements mailing list (especially the folks who install the software). Anybody who is interested in the future of TUI and willing to discuss features should join the discussion group. It would be *very* useful to get critical mass in the discussion mailing list -- I think the community would be happier with the final product. .... I think users are generally happy with what we have implemented so far. But when I have some usability questions I often don't know who to talk to. Having a few names of users of various instruments, folks who are willing to talk to me occasionally would be very handy. It's not yet clear if the discussion mailing list will prove useful, whereas having a few names now would definitely be useful. So...might you spread a call for volunteers?" The TUI mailing lists that Craig Loomis has set up are: TUI-announce@apo.nmsu.edu - _Low_ traffic announcements of new versions and significant operational changes. TUI-discuss@apo.nmsu.edu - A forum for discussions, suggestions, complaints. See http://mail.apo.nmsu.edu/mailman to subscribe. Only members can post.] ********************************** Director's Search: Rene and BruceB said that this will be discussed at the Board meeting in a couple of weeks. ********************************** Last month's minutes were approved without comment. Next meeting Monday, December 8, 11:30 AM Eastern Time --============_-1143616866==_ma============ Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" <!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 } --></style><title>Users Commitee meeting minutes 11/10/03</title></head><body> <div align="center">APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 11/10/03</div> <div><br></div> <div>Attending: Ed Turner, Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, John Bally (replacing Mike Shull), Rene Walterbos, Al Harper, Jon Holtzman, Bruce Balick, Russet McMillan</div> <div><br></div> <div>Absent: Karl Glazebrook, Don York, Jim Green</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>General</b>: After many years of selfless and dedicated service, Michael Strauss has accepted our offer to retire from taking the minutes, and starting this month Bruce Gillespie has agreed to take over this task. With great difficulty, we will strive to approach Michael's standards for turnaround speed and accuracy.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Also, we are experimenting with the Princeton teleconference system for this meeting. It seemed to work quite adequately, so we will continue to use it for future meetings because it is considerably cheaper than the commercial AT&T teleconferencing service.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>GRIM2 Problems</b>: The "lost-quad" problem has returned, the second time in a about a month. The site staff have exhausted their means of trouble-shooting this problem using component swapping, and Al Harper is working to set up a site visit by Yerkes engineer Dale Sandford to diagnose and hopefully solve this problem. In the meantime, GRIM2 is unavailable for observing. Fortunately, there is very little scheduled use of GRIM2 through the end of this year, and the scheduled users of the instrument have been notified.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>Board of Governors meeting preparations</b>: A couple of institutions have sent recent science highlight to Ed, and there is room for other institutions to do the same. Rene Walterbos needs lists of 2003 APO 3.5-m-based publications, and in particular he needs reports of student activities that involve the telescope, which we believe to be extensive.</div> <div><br></div> <div>A main topic for the Board meeting will be plans to acquire a NIR spectrograph.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>SPIcam Upgrade Proposal</b>: John Bally announced that he and Josh Wallender at CU are planning to design a "focal reducer" for SPIcam. The current thinking is to build a refractive (or possibly all-reflecting) optic that turns the telescope feed from f/10 to f/5, quadrupling the area of sky coverage, giving .28 arcsec/pixel sampling with no binning. It is possible that the initial implementation of this upgrade would be for Nasmyth, and ultimately a repackaged design would be mounted on a corner port, incorporating its own guider, rotator, and tip-tilt. There was some discussion about the advantages of tip-tilt efficacy over a medium-large field of view, but in general people were pretty enthusiastic about the general concept of making SPIcam a larger-field imager. John Bally should try talking to Chris Stubbs and Jeff Morgan about this, which is similar to an earlier concept they were exploring for a wide-field camera. Stray-light rejection may be a problem, unless there is a field stop at a pupil using the all-reflective focal reducer design. UWash engineering staff could be involved to help John with the design, especially in the recovery of as-built drawings of the current instrument. Several people expressed interest in using such an upgraded SPIcam for synoptic and narrow-band imaging, and John Bally is encouraged to bring forward a proposal and design for doing so. Is was mentioned that this upgrade is to go to a "medium-field" configuration, and is not really wide-field. SDSS (and maybe the NMSU 1-meter) are also resources that we can use for wide-field science programs.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>CFH12K camera</b>: Speaking of wide-field imagers, the CFHT has recently announced the availability (for sale, or in trade for telescope time) of its recently retired 12kx8K prime focus imager, which has been replaced by the larger MegaCam. If this instrument could be easily adapted for use on the 3.5-m at Nasmyth, it would have nearly ten times the sky coverage as SPIcam, although seriously over-sampled unless binning were used. A description of CFH12K can be found at:</div> <div><br></div> <div align="center">http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Instruments/Imaging/CFH12K/</div > <div align="center"> </div> <div>There seemed to be no reason not to explore this opportunity, although the "devil is in the details." Ed and BruceG will continue the dialog with the CFHT.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>NIC-FPS Status</b>: John Bally reported that the dewar has passed some recent flexure testing, and the science-grade detector is in house. Plans include bringing the instrument to APO in the summer of 2004 for engineering tests, with science commissioning to follow.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>Fill-in Program Proposal</b>: Don York has proposed providing APO with an observing program of echelle MK standards and ISM variability monitoring targets, which would be used as a fill-in program by the Observing Specialists when conditions are unsuitable (e.g., seriously non-photometric and/or bad seeing) for the primary scheduled science program and the scheduled observer has no other suitable backup program available. This echelle fill-in program would only be invoked if the primary scheduled observer did not object. The group thought this would be a good idea to try as an experiment (although it was not clear how much time in a year would be used this way, maybe only a few hours). Don York should provide the Observing Specialists with a target list and observing instructions, after which the community would be informed about the experiment. If it works out, we could solicit more of these kinds of fill-in programs, but probably only run one at a time, for simplicity.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>TUI (Telescope User Interface) Status</b>: There is much informal "beta" use of TUI for DIS observer as of late, especially by NMSU and UWash observers. It seems to work quite well for DIS, but there are hard problems yet to solve for GRIM2 and the Echelle. The most recent version of TUI uses a new "hub" so users need to download the latest version. Some form of "release" plan will be developed shortly, hopefully by the developers, Russell Owen and Craig Loomis.</div> <div><br></div> <div>[Shortly after the telecon, I received the following from Russell Owen:</div> <div><br></div> <div>".... Also, I would very much like folks to start using the new TUI mailing lists that Craig set up. Anybody using TUI now should subscribe to the announcements mailing list (especially the folks who install the software).</div> <div><br></div> <div>Anybody who is interested in the future of TUI and willing to discuss features should join the discussion group. It would be *very* useful to get critical mass in the discussion mailing list -- I think the community would be happier with the final product.</div> <div><br></div> <div>.... I think users are generally happy with what we have implemented so far. But when I have some usability questions I often don't know who to talk to. Having a few names of users of various instruments, folks who are willing to talk to me occasionally would be very handy. It's not yet clear if the discussion mailing list will prove useful, whereas having a few names now would definitely be useful. So...might you spread a call for volunteers?"</div> <div><br></div> <div>The TUI mailing lists that Craig Loomis has set up are:</div> <div><br></div> <div>TUI-announce@apo.nmsu.edu<x-tab> </x-tab>- _Low_ traffic announcements of new versions<br> <x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab> and significant operational changes.<br> TUI-discuss@apo.nmsu.edu<x-tab> </x-tab>- A forum for discussions, suggestions,<br> <x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab> complaints.<br> </div> <div> See http://mail.apo.nmsu.edu/mailman to subscribe. Only members can post.]</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><b><br></b></div> <div><b>Director's Search</b>: Rene and BruceB said that this will be discussed at the Board meeting in a couple of weeks.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>**********************************</div> <div><br></div> <div>Last month's minutes were approved without comment.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Next meeting Monday, December 8, 11:30 AM Eastern Time</div> <div><br></div> <div> </div> </body> </html> --============_-1143616866==_ma============-- APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 720 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