apo-wiki

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Michael Hayden (OU),

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)

• BYU - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• FGCU - nothing to report other than Derek had a night of good observing recently
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - nothing to report (by email); OU expects to have new Users Committee rep this fall
• Seattle - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report (by email)
• Washington - nothing to report
• Wyoming - 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, 8/06/2024 – 9/02/2024

1) Overview

In terms of weather, August has continued to be monsoonal. The 3.5m summer telescope shutdown also took place in August, successfully, with a return to science on 8/27. There were no visiting classes or instrument teams on site during the month of August.

2) Operations

3.5m Telescope: Telescope has returned from shutdown. Last night an issue occured with the tertiary tip/tilt. Tip/Tilt system has been power cycled and testing is underway to remap and check for problems.

0.5m Telescope: Telescope is working well. Flarecam cooling fans were replaced and is back on the telescope.

KOSMOS: nothing to report.

ARCTIC: was vacuum cycled over shutdown, available for use.

Agile camera failure has been diagnosed to a failed TEC. Purchase order being worked on for repair.

Echelle control computer has suffered a disk drive failure recently. The failed drive has been replaced as has the other drive in the array, raid has been rebuilt and appears to be stable. The computer has also been intermittently experiencing an issue, which we currently believe to be the power supply. Testing is underway with a spare power supply which so far has worked at keeping the system up, stable and usable. IOL measurements appear nominal and are still very good.

DIS red camera experienced an intermittent electronics issue that is still not well understood. Currently, the camera has been recovered and both red and blue cameras are working. Vacuum servicing may occur in Q4, but has not been scheduled yet.

NICFPS was vacuum cycled over shutdown, system is cooled and back in operations.

TripleSpec – Tcamera and Tspec icc computers have had drives swapped in the raid arrays to replace failing drives. System is up and ready.

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We have one remaining unassigned half night in Q3 (Sep 14B). Users should look at the schedule and follow the usual channels for requesting 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 schedule is being assembled now; it should be out early next week.

The Q3 ARCSAT scheduled is posted; there is no open time available. The call for Q4 proposals will be issued after the Q4 3.5m schedule is finished.

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1) Good news: Everything regularly used that is static is ported!

2) Next step: Make a development web server to stage the deployment to test how renaming the site will affect performance.

3) In particular, this development server will allow him to test how the new website will work, once the old website is taken down (especially links that go from new to old), including testing swapping the URL, and checking for links that break.

4) The schedule of this depends significantly on how many telescope issues come up, such as the echelle problems that took quite of bit of time away from this effort during shutdown.

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Nancy, Sarah, Ben and Eric Bellm recently had a discussion with Shri Kulkarni about the possibility of putting a robotic spectrograph for fast transient classification on the 3.5m. The first version of this instrument, developed for ZTF as an R ~ 100 spectrograph for supernova classification spectroscopy, has been on the 60“ telescope at Palomar and it is the leading classifier of transients. In addition to being an IFU spectrograph there is an EMCCD that can used in imaging mode or photon-counting mode (but it has a small FOV and an occultation in the center of the frame due to a pickoff mirror). It has been used for stellar science, AGN, and other science, but transient classification is really its main goal. We want to understand from the 3.5m user community whether there is an appetite for devoting some telescope time to this kind of science. This topic raised some great questions and comments:

• Bill: who would be doing the observing for this kind of project? Nancy/Eric: that's really up to us to decide, but we don't have an expectation that this would fall on the shoulders of the observing specialists.
• Bill: from a technical standpoint, if the instrument were to be mounted on Agile's port, that would require a rotator, which could be an expensive addition.
• Adam: would users be able to propose to use the instrument for their own programs or would it be used only for transient observations? Nancy: We would want our users to be able to use it for other science.
• Adam: what is its primary advantage over KOSMOS given the wavelength coverage? Nancy: it has lower spectral resolution (which some but not all users would want) and the data are reduced and posted very rapidly (~ 15 minutes from data acquisition to posting online).
• Ben: when the Time Domain Astronomy Working Group (TDAWG) was active several years ago there was interest in the possibility of cross-institutional collaboration to use a portion of the available time for this kind of work.

Nancy will draft a synopsis of this discussion and send it to the Users Committee reps. The reps will then send it to their users and solicit their feedback in time for the next meeting. Meanwhile, Nancy will continue to discuss the technical aspects with the observatory staff to determine whether this is a viable option.

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: get ROM costs for new KOSMOS grisms. Sarah reported that she is still working with few different vendors due to some weird materials issues. Apparently the KOSMOS gratings were made in an unusual way and now one or two of the glasses are no longer available. She is trying to understand what about the design is making vendors uncomfortable and several of them are no longer doing this work for astronomy. STATUS: OPEN.
• 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. Waiting for new web site deployment may not be the best approach. Nancy will get examples of this issue from Anne Verbiscer and get something added to the current web site before the next meeting.
• UC reps: remind your users to review the Q3 schedule and request OPEN/DD time if they can make a good case for it.
• Nancy: send UC reps a summary of the time domain discussion and request to users.
• UC reps: send Nancy's time domain discussion summary and solicit user comments and interest levels by next meeting.

Open action items from this meeting:

None.

The next meeting will be on October 1 at 10:30 MDT.