apo-wiki

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Denise Stephens (BYU), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Eric Bellm (UW), Russet McMillan (APO), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Adam Kowalski (CU), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Ben Williams (UW), Misty Bentz (GSU), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Derek Buzasi (FGCU)

• FGCU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• Seattle - Joanne sent Sarah Tuttle a list of targets for testing the manufacturing process of slit masks
• BYU - nothing to report
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - Muk recently conducted two back-to-back on-site training visits for a large group of students and two TA's. He passed along his thanks to Russet, Candace and the observatory staff for making their visit so enjoyable and informative. Nancy will send Muk the updated training evaluation form so he can distribute it to his students.
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report (by email)
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report

The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's call.

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 4/05/2022 - 5/01/2022

0) Overview

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.

Weather for April has been cloudy, mostly seasonal.

Q2 in person training started with OU training in early April.

1) Telescope

The telescope experienced an (as yet) unexplained pointing shift in March. It appears to be related to an un-commanded movement in one of the secondary actuators. Pointing was reset and the telescope is being monitored.

2) Instruments

KOSMOS: Commissioning activities are continuing; the instrument is still being offered on a shared risk basis. A replacement shutter for the slitviewer is on order (low temperature operation issue). Flux was decreased for internal lamps, more tuning is needed.

DIS: Had a power supply failure in early April. Repaired on 4/20. Scattered light has leveled off for both the blue and red cameras. Please note that the red camera flat field lens has significant water spots. Extended object science is not recommended with the red channel at this time.

TripleSpec: TCAM had a failure in early April; the RAID is showing some signs of failure. We have also taken the precaution of replacing fans and the power supply in the tcamera-icc. Attempts to recover the system have so far failed. The TripleSpec science camera was working fine except that telescope information is missing from the headers (similar to the problem with Agile) while tcamera-icc is down. Attempts at observing science targets without the use of TCAM have been mixed. Brighter targets have shown greater success.

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 (mid December). A recent pointing issue is also being investigated.

Echelle: Echelle inter-order light has leveled off.

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.

We expect to be working on the commissioning of two PI-level visiting instruments in Q2.

3) ARCSAT: Recent use has been relatively problem free.

DIS KOSMOS Tspec

xxx

The first OPEN/DD time that is available in Q2 is at the end of April; we have already received some requests for it. There is quite a bit of OPEN time in June. The early OPEN time is in B half, whereas there are some A halves available in June.

Interested users are encouraged to request any OPEN or DD time through the standard procedure, i.e. by emailing Ben, Russet, Nancy, and their institutional scheduler.

xxx

Updated shutdown dates: 1-23 Aug, return to science on 8/24.

The 3.5m users wiki needed to be migrated to a different platform because the old one (trak) was not compatible with python 3. We identified a new wiki platform, DokuWiki, which we are migrating to. It should be straightforward to migrate users from the old wiki to the new one, and most of the old content was migrated from trak to DokuWiki.

Because we are in the midst of revamping the wiki, this is a good time to reevaluate its purpose, organization, content, and utility. A quick poll of the Users Committee reps indicated that most people either don't use it or have used it in the past as a reference for data reduction guidance. While it is not intended to supersede information that is on the APO web pages (maintained by APO staff), the user contributed wiki is viewed as a path towards documentation, i.e. a repository where users can report things that work, issues they have had with data reduction, etc.

The UC reps were asked to disseminate the link to the new wiki (http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/apo-wiki/) and ask users for feedback concerning the following:

• content: what is missing (what do you wish were there that you can't find)? are there obsolete items that can be removed?
• organization: does the structure make sense? is it easy to find what you are looking for?
• utility: how can we make the wiki more useful for user community?

The UC reps should plan to report the feedback they receive from their department members at our next meeting.

updates:

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: start investigations re: short wavelength throughput (climate data, other facilities). Status: OPEN. Nancy reached out to some colleagues at other observatories to ask about short wavelength performance degradation of their optical coatings. Still waiting to hear back. She will consult with Bill to make sure we are asking the right people.
• Nancy: coordinate with Candace on revisions to training feedback form
• UC reps: notify your users of remaining open/DD time in Q2
• UC reps: get feedback from users on wiki (see above)

New action items from this meeting:

Discussion of calls for second half of 2022. Proposed dates: Jul 5*, Aug 2, Sep 6*, Oct 4, Nov 1, Dec 6

The next meeting will be on Tuesday June 7, 10:30 am MDT. The remaining meeting date for Q1-Q2 2022 is June 7.