apo-wiki

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Michael Hayden (OU), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Russet McMillan (APO), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Adam Kowalski (CU), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Shane Thomas (APO), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Derek Buzasi (FGCU)

• BYU - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• FGCU - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Oklahoma - nothing to report
• Seattle - nothing to report; Joanne has been talking to Jamey about slit masks for KOSMOS
• UVa - nothing to report other than a user was searching for info on ARCSAT using the new web site and reported that many of the links are broken
• Washington - nothing to report
• Wyoming - 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, 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 mechanism. The tip/tilt system has been power cycled and testing is underway to remap and check for problems.

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

KOSMOS: nothing to report.

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

Agile: the camera failure has been diagnosed to a failed TEC. A purchase order is being worked on for the repair.

ARCES: The echelle control computer suffered a disk drive failure recently. The failed drive was replaced as was the other drive in the array; the raid was 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; so far this has worked at keeping the system up, stable and usable. IOL measurements appear nominal and are still very good.

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

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

TripleSpec: Both Tcam and Tspec icc computers have had drives swapped in the raid arrays to replace failing drives. The system is up and ready.

The weather pattern continued to be monsoonal throughout August. The 3.5m returned to science nicely on 8/27/24 after the summer shutdown. The shutdown provided lots of training opportunities for our newest 3.5m staff members (Cary Smith and Torrie Sutherland). We are currently experiencing an issue with the tip-tilt mechanism on the tertiary mirror. This seems to happen yearly (perhaps due to noise on the lines?). The system was power cycled and rehomed twice in past week and we are continuing to monitor it. Nancy asked what this issue would look like from an observer's perspective. The tertiary error message would come through on the TUI logs and should be spotted by the obs-spec on duty. An observer might notice pointing or focus issues, especially after changing ports from NA2 to the echelle. If the recovery process is straightforward it takes 15-30 minutes.

FlareCam cooling fans replaced, back on telescope.

KOSMOS - behaving as expected. ARCTIC - vacuum cycled Agile failure - TEC failure, working on repair now. No estimate for return date yet. ARCES - problematic last month. Disk drive failure, software RAID array on 2 disks. Intermittent failure due to power supply in computer - currently desktop temp solution and then new drop-in power supply on order. IOL nominal. Haven't seen any disk errors since new one installed. Would manifest as slowing down of instrument operations - lots of info is scrolling by, log starts filling up.

DIS red experienced electronics issue right before shutdown. Has constant pixel value when it fails. Bill rebooted and issue went away. Vacuum servicing likely to happen in Q4.

NICFPS vacuum cycled over shutdown.

Tcam and Tspec operational.

THANK YOU TO 3.5m STAFF FOR DOING SUCH A GREAT JOB WITH SHUTDOWN ACTIVITIES AND TRAINING!

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. October A halves are extremely oversubscribed; some programs may not get exactly what they asked for. Lots of partial night programs in Q4 (monitoring) - look for flexible programs to fit in after/before them.

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. Anticipate coordinated programs in Q4

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1) Good news: Everything regularly used that is static is ported! (might have missed some) - let us know if missing anything, send us link of old

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.

Adam - 5 replies - transient science priority for decade, open new support for grants (emeritus), new theory person very interested, Has there been use for ToO science over years and how much? Adam - wondering if spectra are of science quality or intended for quick look classification, brainstorming how could be used for flare star science. Someone close to Shri 40 pg manifesto about optical/IR science - few paragraphs relevant to 3.5m. Role of 3.5m cites Hypercam instrument could fill niche with time domain -

Kevin - 3 users (2 faculty, 1 student), enthusiastic but likely not sure how serious that is.

Moire - no one volunteered

OU - 2 responses - both would prefer to use higher res instrument but no one does transient science there UWy - nothing Aleksandr - no BYU users Joanne - generally supportive (vague) Derek - too low of resolution Anne - got an email from Mariam Bochaz - expressed great interest in instrument and would like it for Rubin/LSST followup, happy to be involved in working group

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. - Finalized quote from 1 vendor and confirmed that it includes manufacturing - it is more money, what is the process for getting them?
• 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.