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Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Eric Bellm (UW), Anne Verbiscer (UVa), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Moire Prescott (NMSU), Russet McMillan (APO), Misty Bentz (GSU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Zach Berta-Thompson (CU), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Ben Williams (UW), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy)

• Oklahoma - no report
• BYU - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report
• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Colorado - the ARCTIC diffuser rotator stopped working and users are asking about the timeline for getting it repaired; one user had a weird issue with KOSMOS when it stopped taking exposures
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report
• Seattle - nothing to report
• NAPG - 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, 12/03/24 – 01/07/25

1) Overview

Weather wise, December was 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.

Nothing to add other than what was in agenda. There is a multi-day weather system coming in tonight, which could include snow. The KOSMOS weirdness that Zach reported above has been resolved. There was an emergency vacuum servicing done for ARCTIC; the ion pump was replaced this past weekend. ARCTIC was used B half last night without issue. Russet suggested that we remove the rotation restriction for ARCTIC. The diffuser rotator repair is still to be scheduled; it was tensioned but the rotation sensor is not working properly. Agile is still at the repair shop. ARCES is back and usable after the issue with daytime metrology data described in the site report above. Russet will check with Amanda about headers not being written properly for KOSMOS; this anomaly affected Zach BT a few weeks ago.

We have some unassigned time in Q1. Most are B halves as well as in Feb (8 is next one). Time is listed as OPEN. 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. Only had 2 requests this quarter. Continuing to struggle with frequent failure in communication with camera (“support library error”) - camera is getting old. Temporary fix is fairly quick so if observers can keep an eye on it and report errors it can be recovered pretty quickly. Early March - onsite class and other stuff going on so not available for ARCSAT.

Test tomorrow on converting site to new servers - just heard from Shane that may be rescheduled due to illness.

Still researching applications to improve password handling but it's coming.

No news on ASPEN pre-proposal from NSF. Hope to hear soon. Ocotillo CDR - evaluate subsequent report. Also applying for funding. Will come together in phased approach, bring channels on line one at a time. Start with IFU, follow up with MOS component - more costly and mechanically complicated. Hoping that this would enable supported data reduction development, troubleshooting as we go. Spaces out the cost, reduces impact on budget. End of month have report back to CDR review panel.

In the works.

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 - there are 3 selectable gains - software electability is what has changed and can't get it to work. From last feedback with repair facility that can still be adjusted manually. That IS working. If they are unable to make further progress on software changes we will get camera back and gain can be sleeted at beginning of run by observing specialist. Will likely have to remeasure those gains because the main readout board was changed out during previous camera repair. Previous choices were ~ 1, 2, 4 e/DN.

• UC reps: alert your users to the fact that plans are being formulated for decommissioning DIS (see below).

xxx

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