APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 1/23/06 Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Bruce Gillespie, Michael Strauss, Jon Holtzman, John Bally, John Wilson, Bruce Balick, Al Harper, Russet McMillan Absent: Don York, Karl Glazebrook Minutes taken by Bruce Gillespie ********************************** User feedback, comments from Institutional representatives: Princeton (Michael Strauss)--Michael said his people are pretty happy, no complaints. He added that the PU users feel that there is no problem with the current data security protocols. Data archiving would be useful, but it shouldn't be a high priority for us. Colorado (John Bally)--John reported that the CU users have no concerns about data security, and an archive would be good but it's not that important. NMSU (John Holtzman)--Nothing significant to report. Johns Hopkins--No report given. Chicago (Al Harper)--nothing significant to report. UWashington (Bruce Balick and Suzanne Hawley)--BruceB said he felt the UW users were pretty contented. Suzanne added that a small service-observing program has been successfully initiated for/with George Wallerstein. Univ. of Virginia (John Wilson)--John said he nothing to report. ********************************** Discussion of telescope/instruments report: BruceG summarized highlights from the report (see below). There was no further discussion. ************************* 3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 11/23/05 through 1/19/06 Bruce Gillespie 0) Overview Highlights include a good run of operability for the telescope and instruments, a major design review for the Triplespec NIR spectrograph project, and refinements to the 2006 plans for CIF projects. NIC-FPS was put back into service, and the focus and stray light problems in DIS were fixed. The unusually good weather for this time of year continued, and was largely well used for observing. 1) Telescope The 3.5-m telescope had very little in the way of problems during the past two months. Part of one night was lost when a drive amplifier blew a transistor, which was repaired quickly the next day. There may be a software workaround to prevent this in the future, which is being investigated. 2) The performance of the instruments was nominal, and noteworthy is: o NIC-FPS: The vacuum-leak problem in the NIC-FPS dewar seems to have been solved by the CU developers, and the instrument has been used for science several times in the period. Also, the NIC-FPS Fabry-Perot filter seems to have been repaired by the vendor, and we are planning to test it cold in the instrument sometime in the near future. o DIS: The red camera focus was adjusted to good effect, and the scattered light in the blue camera was determined to be some kind of contamination inside the dewar, which was baked out while vacuum pumping. 3) Engineering and CIF projects A detailed plan and budget for the 2006 CIF projects was developed. More progress was made on assembling the new drive boxes, which should be finished next month. Design work continued on the new top end, and materials have been received and machining work on some of the parts has begun. Maintenance and enhancement of TUI and other software systems continued. The JHU proposal to upgrade DIS was turned into a work plan for 2006. 4) Miscellaneous The 4th Observing Specialist position recruitment was completed; Gabrelle Saurage, who has telescope operations experience both at HET and Keck, has accepted our offer. She will begin training at APO next month, and start work full time in early June. APOLLO has been running for several partial nights each month, and is semi-regularly getting lots of lunar-return photons. ********************************** Triplespec review: Suzanne reminded everyone that UVa is officially joining ARC in a year, and their users are in the meantime getting familiarized with APO through DD time and helping with CorMASS runs. Last month, there was a final design review at APO for Triplespec, the NIR spectrograph UVa is building as their capital buy-in to ARC. The formal review team consisted of Alan Uomoto (chair), Steve Smee (JHU), Tom O'Brien (OSU), Craig Loomis (PU), and Al Harper (UC). The review demonstrated that the UVa instrument components were largely coming along well, and John Wilson said that since the review, the components being built by Cornell and Caltech were building momentum. All in all, the review went well, and an excellent review committee report was submitted to UVa. We expect UVa to respond to the reviewers' comments by mid-February. As part of the UVa/ARC agreement, we are purchasing the Rockwell detector using CIF monies; the order is being placed now and we should have the chip in ~6 mos. or less, with the finished instrument on the telescope in about a year. There is an issue with the NA2 rotator and Triplespec (weight and balance) that is being addressed by a joint APO/UVa engineering collaboration. ********************************** Futures Committee: Suzanne reported that the ARC Futures Committee held a meeting at JHU last month, and after 1-1/2 years of work, the group is converging on a final report. Nearly all of the background material has been assembled, and a suite of models of how to run the observatory (both telescopes) after 2008 is being prepared. A draft of the report is expected to be sent to the Futures Committee members in early February, and they will distribute the report to their respective constituencies for feedback. After assessing the community feedback, the final report will be submitted to the ARC Board of Governors in the Mar/Apr time frame. Based on the recommendations of the report, ARC will probably have just enough time to implement various programmatic options to put us on a stable footing for continued observatory operations in the post-SDSS-II era. ACTION: The Users Committee members will need to help disseminate the draft report to their users. ********************************** Observing software and data access: Suzanne said that Remark is now unavailable for remote observing-- we've pulled the plug, so to speak. Russet said that nobody has used it remotely since last summer. BruceG mentioned that Russell Owen wants to ask all Mac TUI users to upgrade to OS version 10.4. There was general discussion that brought out that this may be inconvenient and/or difficult for some users. ACTION: BruceG will ask Russell what the pros and cons are of keeping TUI compatible with older versions of operating systems and libraries. ACTION: Users Committee members should poll their users to ask if there are compelling reasons to keep TUI operable without using the latest version of operating systems. On the data access issue, Suzanne said that we have no budget set aside to operate and maintain a data archive for the 3.5-m telescope, but we now have enough disk space to allow data to remain intact at APO for from 6 to 9 months after taken. We still recommend that people download their data immediately after observing, because the on-site storage is not backed up. The concern over data security was briefly discussed, and it was decided that since nearly all the users believe their data are secure enough now, if specific concerns about proposal and data security are brought to the observatory's attention, they can be handled on a case-by-case ad hoc basis. ********************************** [open from previous months]: ACTION: Once we collect the the names of the designated institutional systems administrators, BruceG will have them listed on the APO web pages for reference. STATUS: will be completed in January. ACTION: BruceG will write a paragraph about the importance of having back-up programs, to be added to the e-mail automated message we send observers prior to their runs. STATUS: will be completed in January. [new actions from last month]: ACTION: Users Committee members should poll their users to ask if the the present data distribution/security systems at APO are adequate, and if not, why. STATUS: Discussed at January telecon. ACTION: Users Committee members should poll their users to ask if we should permanently archive all 3.5-m data, and possibly make it available to the public, and if so, why. STATUS: Discussed at January telecon. ACTION: Suzanne and BruceG will discuss this [the DIS red focus problem] in the upcoming weekly operations telecon. STATUS: Completed. DIS cameras were refocussed in December by Russet McMillan and Jon Holtzman--much improvement. We are planning a DIS- focus monitoring program for the future, one that routinely compensates for seasonal changes. ********************************** Extra topic-DIS upgrade report: Jon Holtzman said that the JHU contract has been issued for new gratings and the blue-prism upgrade. The procurement of the new red deep-depletion detector has been delayed by the vendor; we're probably looking at summertime installations of all these upgrades. ********************************** Next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday, 27 February, at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. Agenda and other materials will be sent to the committee members during the preceding week. APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 944 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