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Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Derek Buzasi (FGCU), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Russet McMillan (APO), Caleb Wang (UW), Ben Williams (UW),

We started by introducing Caleb Wang, a new mechanical/optical engineer recently hired into the Telescope Engineering Group at UW. Welcome, Caleb!

• Wyoming - nothing to report
• BYU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report (sent by email)
• Colorado - nothing report
• UVa - nothing to report
• FGCU - nothing to report
• Seattle - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• NMSU - 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, 10/3/2022 - 10/31/2022

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 October has continued transitioning to fall-like.

October had no classes scheduled to visit, there was one visiting instrument (NAIC) from NMSU mid-month.

1) Telescope

Telescope is behaving mostly as expected. As the nighttime temperatures continue to drop we expect to see the seasonal issues with motion errors pop up. Those will be mitigated with adjustments to the motion control loops.

2) Instruments

KOSMOS: Internal calibration flux levels have been adjusted and exposure times are set/liked.

DIS: Servicing was completed for both cameras. Focus is good; scattered light is increasing slowly on the red camera but is expected to turn around and improve some over the winter (if it follows the historical pattern). The blue camera scattered light trend is less clear at the moment. Our best guess is that it will stabilize and hopefully turn around and improve.

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 ratios are excellent.

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: Switched to Flarecam in late October, currently in use.

First snowfall last week. DIS servicing completed; scattered light still with us. Issue with telescope this morning; tripped breaker caused motion issue. Remedied. Welcome Gordon MacDonald, xxx. Migration newest version of TUI in pythini3 to various platforms. Updating software for different instruments. upgrade of the hub and associated software. (communications server that acts as traffic co between instrument controls, telescope controls and user). Caleb at APO - learning trip

Second round of slits underway. Revising list now. Delays in WNF, keep getting postponed off equipment. First one waiting to be aluminized, once sign off on that set, do a big batch, hopefully by end of CY. If unusual sizes ppl are looking for we can do that. Organizationally mountain working on MOS slits, now is a good time to try again. Joe has been working on it but now want to do them more easily. Vendor in AZ that has manufactured slits for KPNO , most affordable and fastest turnaround. If have 1-2 ppl more interested, work through the process. Joanne next step.

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. Eric Bellm and Adam - several users

Nov 15B to Jeff Bary, first open time upcoming. Next up is 12/03, rest is in December, there is a lot of it, look for OPEN and DD01, esp if small slices of programs esp with echelle or agile.

Allocation emails going out tomorrow hopefully, early turnaround - requests due by 11/22

There is unassigned time available, all observations involve FlareCam, easy to slot that time Oct time used to train obs-spec on shelyak - ppl can request it

The ARC Board of Governors meeting is on Monday November 7.

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!

stickers

Open action items from previous meetings:

• 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.

• 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.

New action items from this meeting:

xxx

The next meeting will be on Tuesday December 6, 10:30 am MST.