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Attending: UPDATE ALL: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Russet McMillan (APO), Gordon MacDonald (APO), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Eric Bellm (UW), Ben Williams (UW), Michael Hayden (OU)

• Oklahoma - nothing to report
• BYU - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report
• Seattle - nothing to report
• NAPG - 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, 12/03/24 – 01/07/25

1) Overview

Weather wise, December has been very mild in terms of both temperatures and precipitation. There were no astronomers, instrument teams or classes that visited APO in the month of December.

2) Operations

3.5m Telescope: Telescope is working as expected.

0.5m Telescope: Telescope is working as expected.

KOSMOS: nothing to report.

ARCTIC: We performed another emergency vacuum service due to the vacuum softening. The current hypothesis for the cause of this issue is that we may have gotten/installed an ion pump that had a defective/reduced lifetime; it is still struggling to maintain vacuum. We plan to replace it ASAP with minimal or no impact to the science schedule. In the meantime, we have restricted instrument rotation to prevent the ion pump from shorting out when upside down, which seems to be a pattern. Additional maintenance on the diffuser mechanism will be scheduled as well given the reports of intermittent behavior at times.

Agile: It is being worked on at the repair house to investigate the hardware that was changed and how that impacts observing modes/gain settings. APO software control was not able to configure the camera as expected when it was initially tested at APO after the repairs.

ARCES: The system is up, however, over the holiday break there was an error indicating a failure to read images, which led to the instrument control software being restarted. That restart led to additional errors when the system recovered in an unexpected way. We are investigating this further. Science was/is not affected, this only impacted daily engineering IOL data.

DIS: System is currently up and usable.

NICFPS: System is cooled and usable.

TripleSpec: System is up and usable.

APOLLO: system leaks were repaired and the system is in operation.

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We have some unassigned time in Q1 next week (xxx) as well as in Feb (xxx). 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). Users can request time listed as OPEN or DD.

The 2025 Q1 ARCSAT scheduled is posted. There is time available in the last week of December (but with no requests for filter changes).

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xxxx UPDATE xxxx Nancy provided some updates on instrumentation. Ocotillo underwent a Critical Design Review in mid-October and the review panel is working on finalizing their report to deliver back to the instrument team. Work is continuing on the new echelle spectrograph (now called ASPEN, short for ARC Spectrograph for Echelle iNvestigations) and some funding requests have been submitted. We will continue to update this group on a regular basis concerning both initiatives.

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Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: get ROM costs for new KOSMOS grisms. Sarah reported that she has a finalized quote from one vendor. The grism design turns out to be a little complicated, but also, costs have gone up, so these are more expensive than we expected (ballpark $20k apiece). Therefore, we need to explore potential funding sources. We have reached an impasse in terms of prioritizing the desired grism; Nancy will amass all previous emails with grism requests and send to UC reps to query users about whether there is broad interest in a particular grism. This could help identify funding sources, either individually or collaboratively. 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. Nancy received examples of this issue from Anne Verbiscer and will get something added to the current (and new) web site. STATUS: OPEN.
• UC reps: remind your users to review the Q4 and Q1 schedules and request OPEN/DD time if they can make a good case for it. STATUS: OPEN.
• UC reps: remind your users that they can propose to use Agile in Q1 2025 (but must include a backup instrument). STATUS: CLOSED.

Open action items from this meeting:

• UC reps: poll your Agile users concerning whether or not they adjust the camera gain setting
• UC reps: alert your users to the fact that plans are being formulated for decommissioning DIS (see below).

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The next meeting will be on February 4, 2025 at 10:30 MST.