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uc:uc20221004_october_4_2022 [2022/10/04 15:48]
nchanove |
uc:uc20221004_october_4_2022 [2022/10/07 17:18] (current)
nchanove |
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| Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), UPDATE EVERYTHING BELOW THIS | Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Caleb Wang (UW), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Eric Bellm (UW), Ben Williams (UW) |
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| | We started by introducing Caleb Wang, a new mechanical/optical engineer recently hired into the Telescope Engineering Group at UW. Welcome, Caleb! |
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| Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Russet McMillan (APO), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Eric Bellm (UW), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Ben Williams (UW), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), | |
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| === User feedback and comments from institutional representatives === | === User feedback and comments from institutional representatives === |
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| * BYU | * BYU - nothing to report |
| * Colorado | * Colorado - no report |
| * FGCU | * FGCU - nothing to report (by email) |
| * Georgia State | * Georgia State - nothing to report (by email) |
| * JHU | * JHU - nothing to report |
| * NMSU | * NMSU - nothing to report |
| * NAPG | * NAPG - no report |
| * Oklahoma | * Oklahoma - A user recently had 2 nights with KOSMOS and everything went smoothly, They had a question about the setup; they find that blue grating in the central position is slightly different than that of OSMOS on MDM. The spectral coverage for the OSMOS grating is 4000-6800 A, whereas for KOSMOS it is 3800-6600, which is a bit close to H alpha. The blue/center setup is working fine and is usable, but the question was raised whether it would be possible to change the grating center, perhaps by shifting it or making a different slit that was between the current "center" and "high" positions. Sarah and Bill responded that there is no easy way to implement this shift, but they will take this up as a task to explore further as they work through the KOSMOS punchlist. |
| * Seattle | * Seattle - nothing to report |
| * UVa | * UVa - nothing to report (by email) |
| * Washington | * Washington - nothing to report, but Eric suspects some UW users may also be interested in the KOSMOS blue/center wavelength shift requested by Muk. Nancy will follow up with Muk to get a summary of the request and distribute it to see if there is broader interest. [Note added in proof: see KOSMOS discussion below.] |
| * Wyoming | * Wyoming - nothing to report (by email) |
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| The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's meeting. | The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's meeting. |
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| //3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 8/2/2022 - 9/5/2022 // | //3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 9/2/2022 - 10/2/2022 // |
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| 0) Overview | 0) Overview |
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| APO is no longer under any staffing or indoor masking restrictions from the State of New Mexico due to COVID. The COVID vaccination policy for ARC/APO has not changed. | APO is no longer under any staffing or indoor masking restrictions from the State of New Mexico due to COVID. The COVID vaccination policy for ARC/APO has not changed. |
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| | Weather for September has started transitioning to fall-like. |
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| Weather for August has been very monsoonal. | September was a very busy month at APO on the 3.5m side: Wyoming class 9/2-5, Washington class 9/17-21 and two visiting instrument teams -- Los Alamos National Lab and Virginia. October has no classes scheduled to visit, there is one visiting instrument (NAIC) from NMSU mid-month. |
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| September is shaping up to be a very busy month at APO on the 3.5m side: Wyoming class 9/2-5, Washington class 9/17-21 and two visiting instrument teams from Los Alamos National Laboratory and University of Virginia. | |
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| 1) Telescope | 1) Telescope |
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| The 3.5m telescope summer shutdown is over and the telescope was returned to service without major issues. Mirrors were washed, drive systems were cleaned and worn rollers were replaced along with other miscellaneous annual maintenance tasks. | Telescope is behaving as expected. As the nighttime temperatures drop we expect to see the seasonal issues with motion errors pop up. Those will be mitigated with adjustments to the motion control loops. |
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| The telescope secondary issue has not recurred since power board replacement; the system will continue to be monitored. | |
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| 2) Instruments | 2) Instruments |
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| KOSMOS: Commissioning activities are continuing; the instrument is still being offered on a shared risk basis. A replacement shutter for the slitviewer arrived was replaced over shutdown. Flux was decreased for the internal lamps again and the flux levels are being evaluated. Work continues on prototype multi-object masks at both NMSU and UW shops; several programs made use of these prototypes and lessons learned are being applied to the next round of test masks. | KOSMOS: Activities to decrease the flat lamp flux are ongoing. The MOS mask process is being worked through as well. New slit sets are expected to start arriving from UW soon. Discussions are ongoing about what work still needs to be completed to move the instrument from shared risk status to acceptance as a facility instrument. |
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| DIS: Servicing of the instrument is tentatively being planned for early October to attempt to resolve the ice droplets on the red camera. | DIS: Servicing has begun for both cameras. We expect DIS to be returned to science operations on or before 10/21. |
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| TripleSpec: Cold, operational and performing nominally. | TripleSpec: Cold, operational and performing nominally. |
| Agile: Cold, operational and performing nominally. There is a known issue with missing observatory and WCS cards from the headers that we are trying to track down. This problem seemed to originate about the time we converted and moved the hub35m to a new server. | Agile: Cold, operational and performing nominally. There is a known issue with missing observatory and WCS cards from the headers that we are trying to track down. This problem seemed to originate about the time we converted and moved the hub35m to a new server. |
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| Echelle: Echelle inter-order light was slowly decreasing with the warmer ambient temperatures, but increased with cooler monsoon temperatures; the ratios are still quite good. | Echelle: Echelle inter-order light are slowly increasing with the cooler ambient temperature; the ratios are still good. |
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| NICFPS: The instrument is performing nominally with the occasional need to reset the controller due to corrupted images, and previous cautions about rotator angle. | NICFPS: The instrument is performing nominally with the occasional need to reset the controller due to corrupted images, and previous cautions about rotator angle. |
| ARCTIC: Cold, operational and performing nominally. | ARCTIC: Cold, operational and performing nominally. |
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| 3) ARCSAT: Observing started up again after summer shutdown. We had some pointing and software issues at startup but it has been working well since then. | 3) ARCSAT: Shelyak was set up and a training time slot was planned for the observing specialists to get acquainted with the current software configuration. |
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| === Additional telescope and instrument discussion === | === Additional telescope and instrument discussion === |
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| The weather at APO has been very monsoonal over the past month. September is going to be a busy month with two visiting classes, one from UWy (they were there in early September) and the other from UW, and two visiting instrument teams, The summer shutdown was completed and we are now back to normal operations. All routine shutdown maintenance activities were completed and the issue with the secondary mirror has not come back so hopefully it is resolved. Once again the 3.5m technical and operational staff did a fantastic job of conducting a successful shutdown and returning the telescope to science operations without a hitch. DIS servicing is currently scheduled for October. Ed Leon, the 3.5m electronics technician, retired on September 1. Nancy expressed her appreciation for his efforts and dedication to APO and the 3.5m over the past decade. The job ad for his position is now posted ([[https://jobs.nmsu.edu/postings/47642]]) - please share this widely and encourage people to apply! | The weather on the mountain is changing with the start of fall, and we expect to see the normal telescope shifts that are due to temperature changes. KOSMOS is moving off of shared-risk category (see below for more details). DIS is being serviced right now. We anticipate having fewer visitors on site in October. We are setting aside some time on ARCSAT for obs-spec training with the Shelyak so we can support its use more broadly. It is not yet ready to be offered to the broad user community. The software, which is a pre-packaged interface that we have to customize for our needs, still needs a fair amount of work. Currently it requires a complicated set-up procedure at each target one wishes to observe. We would be open to having 1-2 more advanced users help us with testing things out; anyone interested should contact Bill. We recently hired a new software person on the 3.5m side; they will start work on Oct. 17 so will be introduced once they come on board. |
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| === KOSMOS update === | === KOSMOS update === |
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| Over summer shutdown several KOSMOS-related tasks were accomplished. We reduced the brightness of the internal calibration lamps by putting an ND filter in place. This will affect both flat fields and arc lamps, but since observers need to acquire arcs more frequently because of the known instrument flexure we don't want to dim those any further. We are recommending that observers use truss lamps for flat fields if the frames are still saturated. We are currently trying to see if we can address the brightness of the internal quartz lamps but not the arcs, which requires a tradeoff between the needs of narrow vs wide slit observations; no decisions have been made yet. We are optimizing the system for good arc lamp exposures for the moment. A new shutter was installed in the slit viewer camera. We hope to have the new slits from the UW shop by the end of the month. Nancy posted some info to the wiki concerning how some have been handling the flat fielding of KOSMOS data (see [[:kosmos|]]). We have gone through just about one entire cycle of seasonal changes with KOSMOS, so we are now developing a more complete understanding of its behavior with environmental changes. The multi-object capability is still coming; we hope to do some more testing during engineering time soon. | After nearly a year of KOSMOS usage on the 3.5m we are now planning to remove it from shared risk category. Going forward it will be offered to our users as a standard facility instrument. We do still have a punchlist of issues that we're working on, but after having met to discuss those items it was decided that nothing on the list impeded us from moving it off of shared risk. We are aware that the bias level appears to be changing, and the associated controller issues are still being worked on. There are also still some deliverables we are waiting for, i.e. the new slits. Over the next several months we will be reaching out to KOSMOS users who have exercised the instrument for different types of targets (extended source, faint limit, etc.) to help us understand the ramifications of some of the known instrument issues on their data. |
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| ---- | Our meeting about the status of KOSMOS highlighted the fact that APO does not have a standing definition of shared risk and how to transition an instrument off of that status, so as an output of the conversation over the next month we will be putting together a document that defines shared risk and the expected path that takes an instrument through commissioning to becoming a facility instrument. |
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| === Summer shutdown recap === | Note added in proof regarding the issue of the wavelength coverage of the blue center slit: Currently the blue grating on KOSMOS in the central position covers 3800-6600 A, so the red cutoff is very close to Halpha. This setup is not ideal for observing magnetic targets, which have Zeeman splitting of the Halpha line. The high slit position shifts the wavelength coverage to 4150-7050, which is good for Halpha, but now misses some of the higher order Balmer lines. So the question was asked whether it would be possible to have another slit position that would cover the range from 4000-6800 A, or something like that. **UC reps: please query your users to determine if there are additional needs for this capability.** |
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| The problems that we had been having with the secondary mirror have not been recurring since shutdown; we hope it was resolved by the change in hardware that was made during shutdown. We are still vulnerable to a possible recurrence of the tertiary problem we had a few months ago but this is not a frequent issue so we hope it will not recur, The telescope came back together nicely after shutdown and we had good luck during the initial part of the shutdown recovery period. We expect to have good pointing with all instruments, | |
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| === Q3 3.5m scheduling === | === Q4 3.5m scheduling === |
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| There is only one remaining unassigned half night of time, on Sep 30A. [Note added in proof: this has now been assigned; there is no remaining open time in Q3.] | There is no available open or DD time until mid-November, and then there is some more in December. There were a few minor errors in the early version of the Q4 schedule that have since been fixed. These quick fixes were made possible by the fact that the affected parties had checked the schedule as soon as it was published and notified us right away of the problem. ** New users are reminded that they should always check the schedule when it comes out!** It is far easier to fix schedule errors early in the quarter. |
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| === Q4 3.5m scheduling === | === Q4 ARCSAT scheduling === |
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| When the Q4 schedule comes out users should check it to verify the scheduling of their programs. We expect to publish the Q4 schedule by end of this week (i.e. on 9/9). There will be no on site classes in Q4. Several monitoring programs are requesting quarter nights in Q4. Users should copy Amanda Townsend (ajt@apo.nmsu.edu) in addition to Nancy, Ben, Russet, and their institutional scheduler on all schedule related emails. | We have only received one request for Q4 so far, so there is lots of time available. |
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| === Q3 ARCSAT scheduling === | === ARC Board of Governors Meeting === |
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| There is some free time coming up after the week of 9/18 - the last week of the month is unassigned. Once Q4 schedule comes out we will post a call for Q4 ARCSAT proposals. | The ARC Board of Governors meeting is on Monday November 7. Nancy, Ben, and some of the observatory staff are starting to gather the relevant data and prepare their presentations. Nancy reiterated her request for science highlights from each institution (she sent an email request to the 35m-general mailing list on 10/04/2022). It would be easiest if UC reps would collect the slides from their users and send them to Nancy in a single packet. If that is not possible, users should send their slides directly to Nancy. **The hard deadline for receipt of science highlights slides is Wednesday October 26.** Any format is fine. |
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| === Upcoming Meetings === | === Jan. 2023 AAS Meeting === |
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| The ARC Board of Governors meeting is on Monday November 7. Nancy, Ben, and some of the observatory staff are starting to gather the relevant data and prepare their presentations. | |
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| The January 2023 AAS meeting will be 8-12 January in Seattle. There will be lots of UW users there, and hopefully many from other ARC institutions and lease partners as well, We discussed options for doing something special for APO or ARC users. UC reps: please poll your users to see if they would be interested in an APO event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the AAS meeting? One suggestion was to give out stickers to people with posters to indicate that they made use of APO data. Chip suggested that we try to connect those with undergraduates in attendance who are looking for graduate programs with representatives from other ARC member institutions, as a small-scale recruitment effort. Misty suggested that we start a Google Doc where people can list their APO-related posters and talks; this would help with connecting people. The abstract deadline for the meeting is Tuesday October 11! | |
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| We will definitely have an APO booth in the exhibit area, so in a month or two Nancy will be looking for volunteers to help us staff the booth. Stay tuned! | |
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| | The January 2023 AAS meeting will be 8-12 January in Seattle. There will be lots of UW users there, and hopefully many from other ARC institutions and lease partners as well. The abstract deadline for the meeting is Tuesday October 11! We discussed options for doing something special for APO or ARC users. Last month the UC reps were asked to poll their users to see if they would be interested in an APO event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the AAS meeting. The response was moderately enthusiastic, so Nancy will continue to explore options. We will definitely have an APO booth in the exhibit area, so in a month or two Nancy will be looking for volunteers to help us staff the booth. Stay tuned! |
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| * Nancy: start investigations re: short wavelength throughput (climate data, other facilities). Status: OPEN. No news. Old news: Nancy reached out to some colleagues at other observatories to ask about short wavelength performance degradation of their optical coatings. She got some names from Bill and will contact those individuals next. The ongoing discussions about new coatings for the primary also relate to this issue so we will determine our coatings first before continuing to pursue this line of investigation. | * Nancy: start investigations re: short wavelength throughput (climate data, other facilities). Status: OPEN. No news. Old news: Nancy reached out to some colleagues at other observatories to ask about short wavelength performance degradation of their optical coatings. She got some names from Bill and will contact those individuals next. The ongoing discussions about new coatings for the primary also relate to this issue so we will determine our coatings first before continuing to pursue this line of investigation. |
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| * UC reps: notify your users of remaining open/DD time in Q3. -> CLOSED | * UC reps: please poll your users to see if they would be interested in an APO-related event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the Jan. 2023 AAS meeting. -> CLOSED. |
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| * UC reps: remind your users to send Nancy all publications through 2021 by August 31, 2022. -> CLOSED | |
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| * Nancy: track down resources for KOSMOS flat fielding and post them. -> CLOSED. | |
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| New action items from this meeting: | New action items from this meeting: |
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| * UC reps: please poll your users to see if they would be interested in an APO-related event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the Jan. 2023 AAS meeting. | * UC reps: please encourage your users to submit science highlights. **Nancy needs to have them all in hand by Wednesday October 26.** |
| | * UC reps: please query your users to determine whether they have a need for a slightly different wavelength range for the blue grating. |
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| === Next meeting === | === Next meeting === |
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| The next meeting will be on **Tuesday October 4, 10:30 am MDT.** | The next meeting will be on **Tuesday November 1, 10:30 am MDT.** |
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