apo-wiki

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Russet McMillan (APO), Denise Stephens (BYU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Ben Williams (UW), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Sarah Tuttle (UW), John Wilson (UVa), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy)

• NAPG - no report
• FGCU - no report
• Seattle - Joanne's research group is working on KOSMOS data reduction routines with the goal of helping people do long slit reductions with pyVista and IRAF. She will write everything up, including how to handle data reduction for observations made using slit masks. She got data from a colleague at UW and plans to do a side-by-side comparison of data reduced with the different software packages.
• BYU - nothing to report
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• Colorado - no report
• Oklahoma - no report
• NMSU - no report
• Washington - no 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).

We normally get telescope motion errors around this time of year as the telescope warms up. The mitigation strategy that Bill and Russet devised seems to be working well as there have been no issues so far.

Regarding the Agile sync card issue described in the above report, operationally this means that the first exposure in a series may have a problem and the observing specialist would have to restart things. We are seeing this issue roughly 1-2 times per week.

For an ARCSAT update, Denise reports that FlareCam has been working great but BYUCam has not. Bill found a problem with the BYUCam filter wheel that may have been responsible for the instrument crashes, and he will test this when he has time (probably not for quite a while). Russet reported a recent potential issue with FlareCam, possibly condensation. This could be heat related given how hot it has been the past few days but it should get cooler tomorrow and this issue will hopefully go away.

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. If anyone needs any other slit widths, let us know NOW. Sarah expects to be sending these new slits to APO in mid-August so they could be available when we come out of shutdown. For those who have had challenges with the KOSMOS bias levels: Sarah is hoping to resolve this by end of shutdown. She has a few experiments to try during shutdown and will update users as changes get made. She intends to save a backup of its current state so that it will be completely reversible if a user needs the instrument in its current configuration (e.g. to complete a consistent dataset).

Update on new echelle from JW - in conceptual design. Hope that we can have a lot of science/community engagement with the development of the instrument. Broad goal is to develop ARCES replacement to serve needs for another 20 years. working on Conceptual design. Goals: high throughput spectrograph 350-1000 nm. Use state of the art techniques for building. Nominal resolution ~ 30k or higher. We foresee a white pupil spectrograph design (most echellese in last 20 yrs have moved to this) - dual arm, one for blue portion and one for red, tailor cross diseperaion and cameras for both ranges. Atmospheric dispersion corrector to address light loss at edges of band. Tip-tilt image stabilization - remove jitter from atmosphere and telescope. And slit mechanism, slit viewer. Open question: whether their community interest in 2-slice image slicer - imagine having circular spot of target at slit - slicer would divide it into 2 halves, double resolution. High res mode to get 60k. Want to get a sense from community re: whether such a mode would be of interest - has ramifications for detector sampling. Please consider this and talk to users, provide NC feedback. Develop and deliver data reduction suite. Current activities - got 1 HN to use DSSI for high cadence sampling images at NA2 port; interested in knowing how image spots move around at high cadence. This allows us to say something about tip-tilt down to about ~ 27 Hz. IDG - Randy Hammond coming in July to examine NA1 port and telescope structure. Science tiger team has been stood up - purpose is to provide guidance re: what community's desires are, place to vet ideas, etc. Near term goals: in CD phase, hope to have CDR by end of CY23 or early 24, have refined survey of user community for folks to weigh in on science needs. Really interested in feedback and engagement from ARC community so deliver instrument that meets the needs of the community. Practical requirement: funding scenario is daunting, need to develop well though tout science case. Chip: 60k mode would enable lots of science - Caty Pilachowsky -stellar abundances. Kevin: Solar types/giants no difference from 30-60k.

There is no open time left in Q2 or Q3. Shutdown and recovery are potential areas of concern and programs that are scheduled immediately after shutdown are at risk in the event that we need extra engineering time at the end of shutdown.

Q3 ARCSAT proposals are due today; BYUCam will not be available in Q3. We will share updates with users if we learn any more about the aforementioned FlareCam issues. ARCSAT will not available during the 3.5m shutdown.

book-keeping surveys heads-up for Q4

New backdrops for booth, ppl liked swag - great contacts good talks, interest, areas for new collab

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.”

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 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

New action items from this meeting:

None.

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. The meeting schedule for the remainder of CY 2023 will stay on the first Tuesday of the month at 10:30 MT; let Nancy know if you have any conflicts.