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Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Ben Williams (UW), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Adam Kowalski (CU)

• Wyoming - nothing to report
• BYU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report (provided by email)
• Colorado - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report (provided by email)
• FGCU - nothing to report (provided by email)
• Seattle - Joanne reported having had a good experience when she used KOSMOS (about 6 weeks ago)
• JHU - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - nothing to report
• NMSU - nothing recently, but Moire mentioned two suggestions that she sent by email in June: 1) the request for a low-resolution grating for KOSMOS that would cover more galaxy emission lines (that are then ratioed) in a single exposure, 2) comments about some oddities seen in KOSMOS internal+ND flats. [These were also communicated to the observatory staff.]
• NAPG - no report
• Georgia State - nothing to report

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

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 6/06/2022 - 7/05/2022

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 June has been mostly monsoonal, the New Mexico wildfires to the west and north have been affecting observing very little compared to May. Pine and juniper pollen affected observing earlier in June but was not as bad as previous years.

1) Telescope

The telescope experienced an (as yet) unexplained pointing shift in March and a couple others since then. There was one occurrence of this issue in May, an effective workaround to restore pointing and collimation by homing the mirrors appears to help. Root cause of the issue is still being investigated.

Telescope experienced an issue with a tertiary actuator that APO has not been able to duplicate as of yet. Tertiary is working currently and investigations are continuing.

2) Instruments

KOSMOS: Commissioning activities are continuing; the instrument is still being offered on a shared risk basis. A replacement shutter for the slitviewer has arrived and will be replaced in July or possibly over shutdown. Flux was decreased for internal lamps, more tuning is needed, which will take place at the same time as the shutter work. Work is also proceeding on prototype multiobject masks at both NMSU and UW shops.

DIS: Been working well since the power supply failure repair. 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. We will attempt to resolve this issue in early October.

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 (mid December).

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.

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.

Visiting Instruments : We had recent visits from 2 visiting PI instruments in May and June. DSSI (UVa sponsored) and HSAR (LANL lease). They are both scheduled for more time this fall/winter.

3) ARCSAT: Limited to no usage lately.

The weather at APO has been very monsoonal over the past month. The Lincoln National Forest, where APO is located, was recently reopened after a month-long closure, during which all recreational activities and visitors were banned due to fire danger. All 3.5m instruments have been behaving. KOSMOS work is ongoing; the flux levels for the internal lamps will be adjusted during the summer shutdown. Some instruments are experiencing seasonal changes; the echelle inter-order light is still good. There were two visiting instruments on site recently, one from UVa and one from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Both went well, and both have more scheduled time in September. ARCSAT has had limited usage lately due to fewer requests from users.

MOS activities ongoing. 2 pronged approach - make masks at NMSU machined. New slits being made at UW more resources. Sarah involved in joe's efforts (Sarah/Joe working it, APO pulled back - Aggie innovation space - 3D print them w/metal. Joanne's object up at end of august - contact ten MP - getting close?

Now several slots of open time in Aug. 1 second half in July 19B. Want to get word out to users. love to have lots of requests. New dates of shutdown are Aug 3 - Aug 17

all instruments available

July 20th at the latest

build our own - cost prohibitive (and uSFS permit) SOR - get silver curves to examine w/UV use cases

July 19B and Sep

published; room for more requests

July 31 deadline.

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. She got some names from Bill and will contact those individuals next.

New action items from this meeting:

• UC reps: notify your users of remaining open/DD time in Q3. Status: OPEN.
• UC reps: remind your users to send Nancy all publications through 2021 by July 31, 2022.

xxx

The next meeting will be on Tuesday August 2, 10:30 am MDT.