apo-wiki

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

• BYU - nothing to report
• FGCU - no report
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - due to the failure of Agile some OU users are exploring the use of ARCTIC for high cadence photometry. Russet performed some speed tests of various readout modes and windowing with ARCTIC and they seem promising (see results here). Muk requested that we get a BG40 filter for ARCTIC for photometry of blue targets; Bill got some quotes and the filter has been ordered. We hope to get it within the next 60 days.
• NAPG - no report
• Seattle - Joanne's collaborators are going to APO with some students for a training visit at the end of this week. She is still trying to refine a data pipeline for KOSMOS data taken through slit masks; the pipeline will be provided both in IRAF and python. She is talking with Bill and Joe Burchett about it.
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report (by email)
• Colorado - no report
• UVa - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NMSU - Moire has a teaching conflict this semester so Eric Nielsen will continue as the NMSU UC rep for a few more months.

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

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 8/01/2023 – 9/04/2023

1) Overview

It has been a very busy and exciting month at APO! Shutdown started in late July and culminated with the return to sky on 8/23. The mirror was successfully recoated at Lowell Discovery Telescope outside of Flagstaff. The team of Bill Ketzeback, Amanda Townsend, Riley DeColibus and Jamey Eriksen escorted the mirror to LDT, worked with the LDT team who cleaned, stripped and recoated the mirror in the LDT chamber, and then escorted the mirror back to APO.

In late August a visiting team from UVa for DSSI arrived at APO. In September we will host a visiting group from the Pacific Northwest, along with a group associated with the SDSS project for a software coding workshop.

2) Operations

3.5m Telescope:

The telescope returned to operations post-shutdown. The M3 rotation failure has been narrowed down to a failed high resolution encoder. A replacement has been ordered, a new mount is being fabricated and we anticipate being able to test the replacement encoder in 2 weeks. A plan is also being developed for an upgrade path for the M3 rotation system because of the obsolete parts in the system (the motors and motor encoders, which we have not been able to find spares for).

The telescope balance has been marginal after the removal of the LANL instrument. There is an occasional motion error during slews. So far no reports have been received about motion errors while tracking. Further refinements of telescope balance are ongoing.

Instruments:

- KOSMOS was warmed up during shutdown for a vacuum cycle with a getter recharge; the instrument is now cooled and operational.

- servicing of the ARCTIC diffuser rotator had to be postponed; it will be rescheduled for a later date.

- The Agile TEC controls failed. Princeton Instruments will no longer support the camera or controller hardware. Finding and ordering surplus equipment in an attempt to repair it has so far been unsuccessful.

- The ARCES inter-order light ratios (measure of scattered light in the instrument) are still good but are declining again in the warmer weather.

- The scattered light in the DIS red camera improved dramatically recently (attributed to a detector partial warm up) and the camera is considered to be very good. However, the blue camera is still considered sub-par.

0.5m Telescope: The filter wheel has failed. Attempts to repair it have so far been unsuccessful. A replacement filter wheel is being researched.

It has been a very busy, exciting, and stressful 2 months! The 3.5m primary mirror was successfully recoated at Lowell Observatory in the chamber at the Discovery Channel Telescope. We will distribute the data regarding the new coating performance once they have been fully reduced.

September is another busy month with the DSSI team on site, the SU collaborators visiting this week, and the SDSS coding workshop here later this month.

Following a successful summer shutdown the 3.5m telescope is back in operations.

Prior to summer shutdown we had a failure of the rotation mechanism for the tertiary mirror. The problem was traced to a high resolution encoder; a replacement encoder was ordered and is now being tested, and we hope to try it on the telescope tomorrow. Once it is functional we will work on defining the upgrade path to bring that entire system to newer technology. Bill is still fine-tuning the telescope balance following the removal of the LANL instrument.

Other engineering tasks remaining including examining the ARCTIC diffuser rotation mechanism, which is not currently working, and identifying a fix for the failed filter wheel in ARCSAT. Jack recently tested out PlanetCam, his high-speed imaging camera, on the 0.5m.

Regarding the data taken to measure improvement in the mirror perfomance, we have both in-lab data (acquired at DCT) and on-sky data, which was acquired during photometric conditions but with very bad seeing. The data are currently being reduced; we may try to take more on-sky data during the next engineering run.

cyber attack we reevaluated our security - biggest hole is mail server at APO second thing: backups - everything backed up pn site to VM , now instituted off-site cloud back up for all critical systems now inventorying hardware if have replacements, install VM look at critical systems in observing control rooms most ransom ware are from users clicking on an email - we will be moving it to a more modern one cost w/offsite backup is few $k per year, slowed down radio link for first initial backup

mailing list requests

There is no open time left in Q3.Looked for opportunities to reduce M3 rotations but there weren't a lot because we didn't find many. But we are getting faster at doing it in person. Had one ToO call last night; payback date will be updated in next Q3 update.

Schedule in progress, might be ready in a couple days. Monitoring programs coming back (Q4, Q1), quarter night programs adjacent to each other. Fine when last 2 quarters of night, so other programs have lots of shares. 7 different programs doing partial night observers. Some 1-2hrs at beginning or end. Fewer very flexible programs to pad those. Hoping teriaty rotations will be faster. If you think start/end times are wrong let us know. Packed so efficiently that we'll have several open bright halves for people to request. Also have several classes (4) and another visiting instrument run back to back

Aleksandr - Mike Joner is scheduled soon and the filter wheel is broken and we don't have an estimate for when it would be fixed but we need to tell him soon. He can choose to observe with no filter or request time later on. Hopefully have answer about wheel before sending out call

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: track down missing ARCTIC data reduction scripts for wiki. → OPEN XXX. Making progress on it this week.

New action items from this meeting:

• xxx

High speed imaging -is MBASIC still on the table? multi-bad

The next meeting will be on October 3 at 10:30 MDT.