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Telescope and Instruments Report

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

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 6/6/2023 – 6/26/2023

1) Overview

APO weather for June has been variable, with some thunderstorms and some very nice clear skies.

June has been busy so far this month. Two training groups have come and gone with the third coming in the upcoming week. Instrument teams have visited and had some successes as well. The end of June and July will be busy as we prepare for summer shutdown.

2) Operations

3.5m telescope: operated nominally over the past few weeks.

0.5m telescope: issues with camera control and instrument drivers are being investigated.

KOSMOS: has been stable since the last report.

ARCTIC: the diffuser rotator service had to be postponed; it will be rescheduled for a later date.

Agile: the clock sync card is being reset manually as needed.

Echelle: the inter-order light ratios (measure of scattered light in the instrument) are still quite good but are declining again with the warmer weather.

DIS: scattered light is improving slowly as expected, however, the blue channel is still considered by the APO staff to be poor and the red is considered borderline usable.

3) Other

Test fit of the mirror support system was done at Lowell last week and parts were left in the chamber under vacuum in anticipation of the upcoming recoating. The schedule is on track for the July/August shutdown and mirror recoating dates. Repairs and maintenance are ongoing for various site metrology units (dewpoint and dust sensors).

Additional telescope and instrument discussion

xxx

KOSMOS slits update

We will be delivering 28 slits, 4 of each of the following widths (3 mounted positions and a spare): 0.8, 1.0, 1.3, 1.6, 2, 5, and 20 arcseconds.

Instrumentation update

xxx

Q2-Q3 3.5m scheduling

xxx

Q2-Q3 0.5m scheduling

xxx

Training update

book-keeping surveys heads-up for Q4

June AAS meeting recap

xxx

Annual Request to Update Publication Record

Please send Nancy any references for 3.5m-related publications (anything published from Jan 1 2022 to now). The deadline is July 31. Understanding the scientific usage and impact of the telescope is critical for evaluating future projects, initiatives, instrument concepts, etc., thus we need your help in updating our publication record! We are now participating in a cross-observatory analysis of scientific impact of ground-based telescopes, so it is especially important that we capture all publications resulting from APO observations. Any publications resulting from ARCSAT data are also requested. The listing should include refereed publications and student theses and dissertations (not conference abstracts unless they are peer reviewed) that made use of data acquired with the 3.5m and/or ARCSAT, published from 2022 to the present. If a paper has been submitted to a journal but has not yet completely gone through the review process, please include that as well, with the name of the journal and “submitted.”

ACTION ITEMS

Open action items from previous meetings:

Nancy: track down missing ARCTIC data reduction scripts for wiki. → OPEN. Making progress on it this week.
UC reps: please urge your users to review the Q3 schedule and let us know immediately if there are errors. → CLOSED
UC reps: please notify your department members of the July 31 deadline for sending Nancy listings of papers from January 1, 2022 to present that made use of 3.5m and/or ARCSAT data. → OPEN

cookbook on how to make MOS masks?

New action items from this meeting:

All Other Business

None.

Next meeting(s)

The August meeting, which would be scheduled for August 1, will be canceled as it will be in the middle of summer shutdown. Therefore our next meeting will be on September 5, and we will use that opportunity to discuss our return to operations in late August at the conclusion of the summer shutdown.