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Attending: < fill in here >

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)

• UVa -
• Wyoming -
• Washington -
• FGCU -
• Seattle -
• JHU -
• Georgia State -
• Colorado -
• Oklahoma - nothing to report (submitted by email)
• NAPG -
• BYU -
• NMSU -

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

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 7/5/2022 - 8/1/2022

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 July has been monsoonal, with dust also contributing to occasional closures.

1) Telescope

The telescope secondary issue may be related to the galil controller resetting. A power supply board was changed out and behavior 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 has arrived and will be replaced during the summer shutdown. Flux was decreased for internal lamps, more tuning is needed; this 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. Some preliminary fields were observed and lessons learned are being applied to second round of test masks.

DIS: Servicing is tentatively being planned for early October to attempt to resolve the ice droplets on the red camera.

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.

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.

3) ARCSAT: Limited to no usage lately.

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Open time

Allocations will be sent out later this week. ANY CLASS TRIPS? we need to know ASAP

The ARCSAT Q3 schedule is now published; there is still room for some more requests.

APO needs your help in updating the observatory publication record! Please send Nancy (nchanove@nmsu.edu) any references for 3.5m-related publications (refereed publications and student theses/dissertations that have been published or submitted) from Jan 1, 2021 to now. The deadline was July 31 but Nancy can take all updates through the month of August.

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 August 31, 2022.

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The next meeting will be on Tuesday September 6, 10:30 am MDT.