apo-wiki

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU),

Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Russet McMillan (APO), Derek Buzasi (FGCU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Gordon MacDonald (APO), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Ben Williams (UW), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU),Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Caleb Wang (UW), Adam Kowalski (CU), Anne Verbiscer (UVa)

• JHU
• UVa
• FGCU
• NAPG
• NMSU
• Seattle
• Colorado
• Wyoming
• Oklahoma
• Washington
• Georgia State

no report 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, 12/5/2022 – 2/5/2023

1) Overview

Happy New Year! APO is weathering the winter storms - it seems like there has been more snow this year compared to the previous couple of years. The site has experienced cold temperatures and snow sticking around for a significant number of days.

December and January were quiet in terms of class or instrument teams visiting the observatory. February will see the planning finalized for the UVa (DSSI team) and CU class (France), which are both scheduled to come in March with some slight overlap. We are also looking forward to a rescheduled UW visit for KOSMOS servicing, which we hope will happen in February.

2) Operations

The 3.5m telescope as well as the 0.5m ARCSAT telescope have both performed as expected over the past two months. Of note for the 0.5m telescope: it will soon have a loaner FLI camera installed as a replacement for SurveyCam. The goal is to have it installed by the beginning of Q2. The FLI camera was provided by BYU for use at APO - thank you BYU!

TUI 3.1.0 is available for most common OS versions (MacOS, Windows, Linux).

The KOSMOS instrument is slated for servicing, with UW visiting APO for the work. A good news item related to KOSMOS is that the upgraded slit viewer shutters have not had any issues with cold temperature operations this winter.

DIS scattered light is improving slowly, as expected. However, the blue channel is still considered bad and the red channel is considered borderline usable by APO.

There is nothing new to note for any of the other instruments.

3) Other

Efforts are continuing for the design of a system that will allow the 3.5m mirror to be coated in the LDT chamber.

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We have two open dates coming up soon: Dec 13B (brightish) and Dec 16B (grey); Dec 17B is also open but has been requested. Then we have some dark slots (shorter, but still ~ 4 hours of time since the winter nights are longer) on 27-29 and 31 December. We have 5 slots total in late December, with 2 requests received so far. We welcome requests and are eager to fill the mid-December time, although we will not publish a schedule update until the Q1 schedule is finished (so around Dec 9 or 10).

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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.

New action items from this meeting:

• Nancy: make sure that the APO web site gets updated to address the issues reported by Eric B.
• UC reps: distribute information about the AAS meeting and our request for participation/help at the booth.
• Nancy: send out a new calendar invitation with the UC meeting dates for 2023.

None.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday Mach 7, 10:30 am MST.