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Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Derek Buzasi (FGCU), Adam Kowalski (CU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Russet McMillan (APO), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Eric Bellm (UW), Ben Williams (UW), Shane Thomas (APO),

• Wyoming - no report
• Washington - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report (by email)
• Seattle - nothing to report
• FGCU - nothing to report other than they had a night of good observing recently
• Oklahoma - nothing to report (by email)
• NMSU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• JHU - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• BYU - 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, 7/02/2024 – 8/05/2024

1) Overview

July has transitioned to a monsoon pattern with a few nights lost to smoke from the huge fires in the West/Pacific Northwest and Canada. The telescope has continued to work well.

July started out with a group of REU students from GSU visiting, then immediately afterwards we hosted a group from University of Wyoming.

The 2.5m shutdown began on July 10th and we have had a couple visiting instrument folks to work with the APO staff on those shutdown activities. Shutdown for the 2.5m ended on 7/31.

2) Operations

3.5m Telescope: Telescope is working well, motion errors seem to be of the seasonal type.

0.5m Telescope: Telescope is working well. FlareCam is having a cooling fan issue; it will be repaired and returned to the telescope as soon as possible.

3.5m Instruments:

KOSMOS: The new 1.25” slits have been released for use by observers.

ARCTIC: working well.

TripleSpec: working well.

Agile: The camera was sent out for evaluation and hopefully repair. The manufacturer confirmed that the problem is inside the camera head; they are proceeding with opening the camera vacuum to evaluate the issue further.

Echelle: The inter-order light has stabilized in both the blue and red; the instrument is still considered excellent for use. An inadvertent partial warmup happened when a sensor failed in the autofill system. The system is cold again, and no adverse effects resulted from the partial warmup.

DIS: the instrument is still functioning, and contamination is slightly improved on both cameras.

NICFPS: had an ion pump/vacuum issue and is being warmed for service.

There was a fire approximately 2 miles from the observatory yesterday (to the north, right before Cathey Canyon parking lot). The fire was spotted by one of the APO staff members as they were driving to work, and it was put out by the Sunspot Volunteer Fire Department. It was likely caused by lightning.

The telescope is behaving nominally. There are several items of note pertaining to the instruments;

• Agile is hopefully going to be repaired; we are still waiting for an evaluation. The problem has been isolated to the camera itself, not control unit.
• ARCES had an inadvertent partial warmup recently when a fill sensor for the CCD reservoir failed. The issue was caught a few hours after the sensor failed and manual fills were initiated. The replacement sensor was quickly replaced and there seem to no adverse effects to the instrument or the resulting data.
• NICFPS recently had a failure of its vacuum system, either a failed ion pump or the vacuum went soft. Bill had already planned to do a vacuum servicing of NICFPS during the summer shutdown so they warmed the instrument and took it offline in preparation for that.
• DIS recently showed an increase in contamination. It is still useable but with a lower performance.

As for ARCSAT, the primary mirror was recently washed. FlareCam had a failure of most of its cooling fans; replacements have been ordered and we are waiting for the parts. Otherwise things on ARCSAT are working nominally.

Russet announced that her team has started training our newest observing specialist, Victoria (“Torrie”) Sutherland (they/them), who was hired recently and started working at APO at the end of July. The target is for Torrie to start solo operations at the end of September. We are delighted to have Torrie on board and users should be on the lookout for them and welcome them when you have the chance!

Jamey recently hosted a Dark Skies group at the observatory and gave a tour to a number of business leaders from the Permian Basin (their activities contribute to some of the light pollution we experience at APO). They loved the tour.

As a final reminder, summer shutdown is scheduled for August 12-26, with a return to science on Aug 27A.

We have a some unassigned OPEN and DD time remaining in Q3 (Aug 27B, several in September). Users should look at the schedule and follow the usual channels for requesting any of this time (i.e. email Russet, Amanda, Ben, Nancy and their institutional scheduler when submitting requests, and provide a proposal cover page if you don't already have a program scheduled for the current quarter).

The Q4 allocation emails went out at the end of last week, and all Q4 proposals are due by Aug 26.

The Q3 ARCSAT scheduled is posted; there is no open time available. The shutdown dates for ARCSAT will be same as for the 3.5m, i.e. August 12-26.

A lot of work is going on behind the scenes to develop a new APO web site. All users are encouraged to review the new web site and confirm that the information you frequently wish to access is there and easily findable for you. The current version of the new site is considered to be in the “alpha state” so it is still fairly preliminary. Once we receive and address the first round of feedback then we will go to a beta version and then deploy it, likely in a tiered fashion. The new web site is going to be mobile friendly, though it may not work well on all pages yet. **UC reps: ask your users to review the new web site (https://newapo.apo.nmsu.edu/) and provide any feedback on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XTGF1ekWatAW-T2xl71rIZgVlEBhtLVWJrkX8cSh8Nw/edit?usp=sharing. Shane will use the summer shutdown for testing out various bits of work that has to be done on the back end before making the switch to the new site, and we hope to deploy the new site at the end of or shortly after summer shutdown.

discussion wi SEDM developed for ZTF - R ~ 100 Sn classification spectorsopy -v1 on palomar is leading classifier of transient classifications. Has been used for stellar science, AGN, transient classification is sweet spot, the idea is intended to be survey followup - putting on 3.5m would gain in collecting power but tradeoff with science that users want to do - is there an appetite for devoting 10-20% of time to follow up in LSST era. In addition to IFU spec there is EMCCD that can used in imaging mode but small FOV and pickoff occultation. Bill K - 10% is substantial amount of time - who would be doing the observing? need someone to do it - could imagine pan ARC consortium with users doing the observing from Tech point of view, given integrated imaging capability that would require rotator at other port - could be expensive - integrating would be likely expensive manpower item for observator given the lost specialization of axis controllers

Adam - would users be able to propose to use the instrument for their own programs or on;y for transient triggers main advantage over Kosmos, lower R, pipeline can spit out data quickly Sarah - discovery engine, Yes ppl could ask for time, but if collection of users were interested in small to medium survey. Eric B - my experience in similar contexts - get group of interested folks with different science but share time so if you don't have target tonight someone else can use it - natural apportioning of time. We would want it to be open to general proposal. Ben W - when we did TDAWG there was interest in possibility of cross-institutional collaboration to use a portion of their time. Eric: that could and should emerge from TAC process. Opportunity that people could take advantage of.

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: get ROM costs for new KOSMOS grisms. STATUS: OPEN. Working with few different vendors, weird material issues. KOSMOS gratings were made in an unusual way - assembled in Tucson. One or two of the glasses are no longer available, trying to work with vendors, still have two but having similar issues with glass. Something about the design is making people uncomfortable so trying to shake that out. Several venires no longer doing that for astronomy.
• UC reps: ask your users to review the alpha version of the new web site to determine whether the content they are used to finding on the web site is still there and easy to find. All feedback should be provided through the Google sheet given above. STATUS: OPEN.
• Nancy: Ensure that a short description of the impact of satellites be posted on the APO website somewhere and updated every 6 months or so. STATUS: OPEN.

Open action items from this meeting:

• xxx

None.

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