APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 1/12/04 Attending: Ed Turner, Michael Strauss, Bruce Gillespie, John Bally, Jim Green, Fred Hearty, Jon Holtzman, Russet McMillan, Bruce Balick, Karl Glazebrook Absent: Al Harper, Rene Walterbos Minutes taken by Bruce Gillespie ********************************** NIC-FPS Status: Fred Hearty (the CU grad student who is working on NIC-FPS with Jim Green and others) reported on several aspects of assembly and testing of NIC-FPS: o Detectors — they are set up to start testing the engineering chip o Fabry-Perot — the new controller is ordered, expected in late February o Cables are being constructed o Filter Wheels — in testing for accuracy and repeatability o Dewar — Completed 2nd thermal cycle, starting 3rd. Heat-up and cool-down seem well controlled. Thermal profiles of bench are good, with 19+ hours hold-time, which is expected to improve. Checking bench flexure now, and next will begin mounting hardware on bench, and adding blankets to dewar. o Detector testing behind schedule, everything else OK for delivery to APO by ~1 August. Filter wheels are populated, one slot left. Baseline filter list will be posted by Fred on NIC-FPS website at http://nicfps.colorado.edu/development.htm. ********************************** Jeff Morgan's Departure: Bruce Balick announced that Jeff Morgan, UWash's senior telescope and instrumentation engineer, is leaving for a lead position at the PanSTARRS project in Hawaii. Jeff will finish the design of the new NA2 baffle for our telescope before leaving. UWash will recruit a replacement, which will take an unknown length of time. Russ Owen will finish with the TUI development this year, and Larry Carey will largely take over some the CIF tasks that Jeff had planned to work on. Bruce B said that the APO work is at the top of the UWash priorities this year. There was discussion on the merit of considering other paradigms for telescope engineering support at APO--however, this would need to be decided at the Director/Board level. ********************************** CFH12K-IFS This refers to the Canada-France-Hawaii 12K CCD detector, which is being offered "to a good home" because it has been replaced by MegaPrime/MegCam, and the proposal by John Bally to use it as part of an Integral Field Spectrograph at the ARC 3.5-meter telescope. A summary proposal was distributed the the Users Committee last week, intended to evoke discussion and expressions of interest at today's telecon. John Bally said that the CFH12K detector would make a lousy imager because the pixel size doesn't well match our telescope, but it makes for a superb IFS that would cover ~5 arcminutes, and be capable of 10**4 to 10**5 spectra simultaneously, at resolutions ranging from a few 100s up to ~10000. This cannot be easily done with a larger telescope, given the normal sizes of lenslet arrays, detector pixels, and spectrograph optics. It would provide ARC with a nearly unique science niche, namely, the ability to do wide-field integral field spectroscope, especially on faint targets (there may be a comparable instrument on the William Herschel Telescope). The design considerations are somewhat challenging (e.g., large collimator, large gratings). There are many diverse science drivers and opportunities detailed in John's proposal. Carl G. asked how spectral overlap is dealt with. John replied that the spectra are separated by 10 pixels, and tilted. Alternatively, for high res grating work, narrow pass-band filters prevent overlap, or can use a prism or grism to avoid overlapping orders. This is a very ambitious proposal, more so than for any other ARC project since the 3.5-m and SDSS were built. It would need application of outside resources, CIF funds, and possibly the offer of significant telescope time. We could consider a cooperative arrangement with the CFH consortium. What we need quickly is to assess the ARC (and CFH) communities potential interest in this proposed instrument. If the user communities seem enthusiastic, we would proceed to negotiate with the CFH officials. We plan to post the proposal to apo35general immediately, and users are asked to funnel their comments about the attractiveness of the instrument to their respective Users Committee representative. We will also send the proposal to officials at CFHT to assess their possible interest in collaborating. Bruce Balick said that the UWash users were as excited by this proposed instrument as any other future 3.5-m instrument. Carl Glazebrook imagines that the JHU users will appreciate and use its unique capabilities. In a separate communication, Rene Walterbos asked that we make sure to include the possibility of instead adapting one of the SDSS spectrographs for IFS use on the 3.5-m, in the event that the 2.5-m is closed after the survey. In answer to a question, John Bally said that the CFH12K detectors have 3 to 5 electrons read-noise, and one of the "quadrants" has a slightly dissimilar response than the rest of the array. Don York wondered if the IFS would get used much, and remarked that there was a proposal for an IFS in the original designs for the telescope that had to be cut due to costs and lack of interest. John Bally answered earlier versions of IFSs are generally narrow-field instruments, and that this IFS is unique and more powerful because of the wide-field format. He also said that IFS pipeline reduction software exists, but would need work before it would be easy to reduce IFS data. ********************************** TUI institutional contacts: Ed Turner remarked that he has only received the names and contact information for TUI installation from two institutions, NMSU and Princeton. He reminded the Committee that if he doesn't get this information shortly from the other institutions, the Users Committee member from those institutions will be named the default person for us to contact about setting TUI up at your institution. ********************************** CorMASS is coming: Bruce Gillespie reminded the user community that the low-res NIR spectrograph CorMASS is coming to the 3.5-m this spring, provisionally for commissioning runs circa 3 - 7 May. If users are interested in any tests or science commissioning experiments during this run, they should contact Bruce Gillespie (gillespi@apo.nmsu.edu). More information on the capabilities of CorMass will be reposted soon. ********************************** 10th anniversary celebration: Users are also reminded that the 10th anniversary celebration for the 3.5-m is scheduled 27/28 May at APO. More information will be posted shortly. In particular, Ed Turner is looking for people who would like to give a science talk or give poster papers. ********************************** New Instrument Call for Proposals: Ed Turner mentioned that a Call for Proposal for new instrumentation projects for the 3.5-m will be issued soon, and be sent to ARC institutions and others outside ARC who have worked with us in the past or present. The object of the CP is to select one major new instrumentation project that will be ARC- and externally funded over the next few years. The deadline for the CP is likely to be early summer, this year. ********************************** 10Mb/sec connection to APO: Bruce Gillespie reported that the site is proceeding with the acquisition of a 10Mb/sec internet microwave connection, to replace the 1 Mb/sec T1 phone line connection we have had all these years. The monthly cost of the high-speed connection is roughly double that of the T1 line, and there are no up-front capital costs. We don't know yet when this will be in place, but probably sometime over the next few months. ********************************** Last month's minutes were approved without comment. Next phonecon will be on Monday, March 8, 2004, at 11:30 AM Eastern Time APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 740 in the apo35-general archive. 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