apo-wiki

Due to the fact that a large number of the 3.5m management and operations team was unavailable for our scheduled Users Committee meeting on Tuesday June 7, the meeting was canceled. Instead, all of the items we would normally discuss are included in the below email that was sent to all Users Committee representatives for dissemination to their department members.

If anyone has any feedback from your users, please pass it along to Nancy and she will ensure that it gets communicated to the appropriate people.

The detailed site report is included below.

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 5/01/2022 - 6/06/2022

0) Overview

APO is no longer under any staffing or indoor masking restrictions from the State of New Mexico due to COVID. The COVID vaccination policy for ARC/APO has not changed.

Weather for May has been mostly seasonal, but New Mexico wildfires to the west and north have affected observing.

1) Telescope

The telescope experienced an (as yet) unexplained pointing shift in March and a couple others since then. There was one occurrences of this issue in May; an effective workaround to restore pointing and collimation by homing the mirrors appears to help. Root cause of the issue is still being investigated.

2) Instruments

KOSMOS: Commissioning activities are continuing; the instrument is still being offered on a shared risk basis. A replacement shutter for the slitviewer has arrived and will be replaced in late June or early July. Flux was decreased for internal lamps, more tuning is needed.

DIS: Been working well since the power supply failure repair. Please note that the red camera flat field lens has significant water spots. Extended object science is not recommended with the red channel at this time.

TripleSpec: TCAM was recovered with help from UVa. Multiple precautions (replacing fans, power supply, grounding, etc) have been implemented in the hopes of eliminating future system failures.

Agile: Cold, operational and performing nominally. There is a known issue with missing observatory and WCS cards from the headers that we are trying to track down. This problem seemed to originate about the time we converted and moved the hub35m to a new server (mid-December).

Echelle: Echelle inter-order light is slowly decreasing with the warmer ambient temperatures, but ratios are still quite good.

NICFPS: The instrument is performing nominally with the occasional need to reset the controller due to corrupted images, and previous cautions about rotator angle.

ARCTIC: Cold, operational and performing nominally.

3) ARCSAT: Recent use has been relatively problem free.

As mentioned in Jamey's report above, during the month of May the site (and all of southern NM) was impacted by smoke due to several wildfires burning in New Mexico. We appreciate users' patience and understanding concerning the closure limits due to dust and smaller particulates, which we recognize can be frustrating for users when the skies seem otherwise clear. The observatory has made improvements in our ability to quantify the dust and pollen in the air, which enables us to make data-driven decisions concerning the balance between the desire to collect photons and ensuring the longevity and continued performance of our hardware.

Users are eager to learn from each other regarding KOSMOS data reduction! There is an effort underway to develop a python-based data reduction package for KOSMOS, which we will continue to provide updates on as we learn more. What about IRAF - are there any IRAF users who have experience reducing KOSMOS data? If so, please add your tips, tricks, scripts, or any other advice to the users' wiki! Contact Nancy if you have trouble accessing your wiki account.

There is a fair amount of OPEN time that is available in late June. Interested users are encouraged to request any OPEN time through the standard procedure, i.e. by emailing Ben, Russet, Nancy, and their institutional scheduler.

There is some open time in June that is available if users wish to request it (for those who can use FlareCam, with ugriz filters).

The Q3 schedule is being built at the time of this writing. As always, users are reminded to check the schedule as soon as it is published and let us know if anything is awry.

Please send Nancy any references for 3.5m-related publications (anything published from Jan 1 2021 to now). The deadline is July 31. Understanding the scientific usage and impact of the telescope is critical for evaluating future projects, initiatives, instrument concepts, etc., thus we need your help in updating our publication record! We are now participating in a cross-observatory analysis of scientific impact of ground-based telescopes, so it is especially important that we capture all publications resulting from APO observations. Any publications resulting from ARCSAT data are also requested. The listing should include refereed publications and student theses and dissertations (not conference abstracts unless they are peer reviewed) that made use of data acquired with the 3.5m and/or ARCSAT, published from 2021 to the present. If a paper has been submitted to a journal but has not yet completely gone through the review process, please include that as well, with the name of the journal and “submitted.”

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: start investigations re: short wavelength throughput (climate data, other facilities). Status: OPEN. Nancy reached out to some colleagues at other observatories to ask about short wavelength performance degradation of their optical coatings. She got some names from Bill and will contact those individuals next.
• UC reps: notify your users of remaining open/DD time in Q2. Status: OPEN.

New action items from this meeting:

• UC reps: request that your users send Nancy all publication references from Jan 2021 to present.

Having heard no objections, the schedule of Users Committee Zoom meetings for the second half of 2022 will be: Jul 5*, Aug 2, Sep 6*, Oct 4, Nov 1, Dec 6. *denotes a Tuesday after a Monday holiday. All meetings will be on the first Tuesday of the month at 10:30 Mountain Time.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday July 5, 10:30 am MDT.