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Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Eric Nielsen (NMSU), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Caleb Wang (UW), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Mukremin Kilic (OU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Eric Bellm (UW), Ben Williams (UW)

We started by introducing Caleb Wang, a new mechanical/optical engineer recently hired into the Telescope Engineering Group at UW. Welcome, Caleb!

• BYU - nothing to report
• Colorado - no report
• FGCU - nothing to report (by email)
• Georgia State - nothing to report (by email)
• JHU - nothing to report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report
• Oklahoma - A user recently had 2 nights with KOSMOS and everything went smoothly, They had a question about the setup; they find that blue grating in the central position is slightly different than that of OSMOS on MDM. The spectral coverage for the OSMOS grating is 4000-6800 A, whereas for KOSMOS it is 3800-6600, which is a bit close to H alpha. The blue/center setup is working fine and is usable, but the question was raised whether it would be possible to change the grating center, perhaps by shifting it or making a different slit that was between the current “center” and “high” positions. Sarah and Bill responded that there is no easy way to implement this shift, but they will take this up as a task to explore further as they work through the KOSMOS punchlist.
• Seattle - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report (by email)
• Washington - nothing to report, but Eric suspects some UW users may also be interested in the KOSMOS blue/center wavelength shift requested by Muk. Nancy will follow up with Muk to get a summary of the request and distribute it to see if there is broader interest. [Note added in proof: see KOSMOS discussion below.]
• Wyoming - nothing to report (by email)

The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's meeting.

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 9/2/2022 - 10/2/2022

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 September has started transitioning to fall-like.

September was a very busy month at APO on the 3.5m side: Wyoming class 9/2-5, Washington class 9/17-21 and two visiting instrument teams – Los Alamos National Lab and Virginia. October has no classes scheduled to visit, there is one visiting instrument (NAIC) from NMSU mid-month.

1) Telescope

Telescope is behaving as expected. As the nighttime temperatures drop we expect to see the seasonal issues with motion errors pop up. Those will be mitigated with adjustments to the motion control loops.

2) Instruments

KOSMOS: Activities to decrease the flat lamp flux are ongoing. The MOS mask process is being worked through as well. New slit sets are expected to start arriving from UW soon. Discussions are ongoing about what work still needs to be completed to move the instrument from shared risk status to acceptance as a facility instrument.

DIS: Servicing has begun for both cameras. We expect DIS to be returned to science operations on or before 10/21.

TripleSpec: Cold, operational and performing nominally.

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.

Echelle: Echelle inter-order light are slowly increasing with the cooler ambient temperature; the ratios are still 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: Shelyak was set up and a training time slot was planned for the observing specialists to get acquainted with the current software configuration.

The weather on the mountain is changing with the start of fall, and we expect to see the normal telescope shifts that are due to temperature changes. KOSMOS is moving off of shared-risk category (see below for more details). DIS is being serviced right now. We anticipate having fewer visitors on site in October. We are setting aside some time on ARCSAT for obs-spec training with the Shelyak so we can support its use more broadly. It is not yet ready to be offered to the broad user community. The software, which is a pre-packaged interface that we have to customize for our needs, still needs a fair amount of work. Currently it requires a complicated set-up procedure at each target one wishes to observe. We would be open to having 1-2 more advanced users help us with testing things out; anyone interested should contact Bill. We recently hired a new software person on the 3.5m side; they will start work on Oct. 17 so will be introduced once they come on board.

After nearly a year of KOSMOS usage on the 3.5m we are now planning to remove it from shared risk category. Going forward it will be offered to our users as a standard facility instrument. We do still have a punchlist of issues that we're working on, but after having met to discuss those items it was decided that nothing on the list impeded us from moving it off of shared risk. We are aware that the bias level appears to be changing, and the associated controller issues are still being worked on. There are also still some deliverables we are waiting for, i.e. the new slits. Over the next several months we will be reaching out to KOSMOS users who have exercised the instrument for different types of targets (extended source, faint limit, etc.) to help us understand the ramifications of some of the known instrument issues on their data.

Our meeting about the status of KOSMOS highlighted the fact that APO does not have a standing definition of shared risk and how to transition an instrument off of that status, so as an output of the conversation over the next month we will be putting together a document that defines shared risk and the expected path that takes an instrument through commissioning to becoming a facility instrument.

Note added in proof regarding the issue of the wavelength coverage of the blue center slit: Currently the blue grating on KOSMOS in the central position covers 3800-6600 A, so the red cutoff is very close to Halpha. This setup is not ideal for observing magnetic targets, which have Zeeman splitting of the Halpha line. The high slit position shifts the wavelength coverage to 4150-7050, which is good for Halpha, but now misses some of the higher order Balmer lines. So the question was asked whether it would be possible to have another slit position that would cover the range from 4000-6800 A, or something like that. UC reps: please query your users to determine if there are additional needs for this capability.

There is no available open or DD time until mid-November, and then there is some more in December. There were a few minor errors in the early version of the Q4 schedule that have since been fixed. These quick fixes were made possible by the fact that the affected parties had checked the schedule as soon as it was published and notified us right away of the problem. New users are reminded that they should always check the schedule when it comes out! It is far easier to fix schedule errors early in the quarter.

We have only received one request for Q4 so far, so there is lots of time available.

The ARC Board of Governors meeting is on Monday November 7. Nancy, Ben, and some of the observatory staff are starting to gather the relevant data and prepare their presentations. Nancy reiterated her request for science highlights from each institution (she sent an email request to the 35m-general mailing list on 10/04/2022). It would be easiest if UC reps would collect the slides from their users and send them to Nancy in a single packet. If that is not possible, users should send their slides directly to Nancy. The hard deadline for receipt of science highlights slides is Wednesday October 26. Any format is fine.

The January 2023 AAS meeting will be 8-12 January in Seattle. There will be lots of UW users there, and hopefully many from other ARC institutions and lease partners as well. The abstract deadline for the meeting is Tuesday October 11! We discussed options for doing something special for APO or ARC users. Last month the UC reps were asked to poll their users to see if they would be interested in an APO event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the AAS meeting. The response was moderately enthusiastic, so Nancy will continue to explore options. We will definitely have an APO booth in the exhibit area, so in a month or two Nancy will be looking for volunteers to help us staff the booth. Stay tuned!

Open action items from previous meetings:

• Nancy: start investigations re: short wavelength throughput (climate data, other facilities). Status: OPEN. No news. Old news: 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. The ongoing discussions about new coatings for the primary also relate to this issue so we will determine our coatings first before continuing to pursue this line of investigation.

• UC reps: please poll your users to see if they would be interested in an APO-related event (e.g. a meal or reception one evening) during the Jan. 2023 AAS meeting. → CLOSED.

New action items from this meeting:

• UC reps: please encourage your users to submit science highlights. Nancy needs to have them all in hand by Wednesday October 26.
• UC reps: please query your users to determine whether they have a need for a slightly different wavelength range for the blue grating.

None.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday November 1, 10:30 am MDT.