Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Jamey Eriksen (APO), Russet McMillan (APO), Gordon MacDonald (APO), Joanne Hughes (Seattle U), Aleksandr Mosenkov (BYU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Eric Bellm (UW), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Jon Holtzman (NMSU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Anne Verbiscer (UVa)
The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's meeting.
3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 2/6/2023 – 3/6/2023
1) Overview
APO is weathering the winter storms; it seems like we’ve had more snow this year compared to the previous couple years. Cold temperatures and snow have been sticking around for significant days through February.
2023 has been quiet thus far in terms of class or teams visiting the observatory, which is about to change this month. March will see the UVa (DSSI) team and CU class (K. France), which overlap slightly. We are also looking forward to a rescheduled UW visit for KOSMOS servicing, which we hope will happen the week of March 20th.
2) Operations
The 3.5m and 0.5m telescopes have both performed as expected over the past month.
TUI 3.1.0 is available for most common OS versions (MacOS, Windows, Linux); work on a Docker mode for TUI is progressing.
KOSMOS is slated for service, with UW visiting APO the week of March 20th.
The ARCTIC diffuser is not rotating in colder temperatures; investigations are underway.
The Agile sync clock signal investigation is in progress as well. Failure rate is increasing.
DIS scattered light is improving slowly as expected, however, blue is still considered by APO to be pretty bad and red is considered borderline usable.
Nothing new to note on any of the other instruments.
3) Other
Efforts are continuing for the design of a system that will allow the 3.5m mirror to be coated in the LDT chamber.
The observatory has been hit with several snow storms that have significantly impacted observing over the past few weeks. The forecast is improving for the next week or so. March is shaping up to be a busy month: the UVa/DSSI team is here now, a CU class will be on site next week, and Sarah Tuttle will be here the week of March 20th for KOSMOS work. More visitors will be coming in Q2, so we expect to be remain quite busy through June.
TUI work is continuing, with a Docker mode in the works.
Instrument updates:
Work is proceeding for getting the 3.5m mirror ready for realuminization at Lowell this summer. We heard from KPNO that they will not be able to accommodate any external mirrors at their coating chamber this summer, so it's good that we decided to proceed with having the work done at Lowell.
In response to last month's action item to provide an update on quick-look data reduction software (in that context, for KOSMOS), we discussed several software options. pyKOSMOS is still in development and we were unable to get a status update before this meeting; Sarah will keep trying.
Jon Holtzman presented an overview of pyvista, which he has been developing for several years. pyvista is intended to be a general purpose software package for reducing astronomical data (imaging and spectroscopy), although it was developed with APO instruments in mind. It is not intended to have a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but it does have a pedagogical aspect to it (i.e. it is not a black box) and is used to teach both undergraduates and graduate students about data reduction. Interested users can read more about it here: https://pyvista.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and are welcome to give it a try; please contact Jon (holtz@nmsu.edu) with any questions. Several people at NMSU are using it to reduce their ARCES, KOSMOS, and DIS data; the photometry and TripleSpec packages are not done or fully documented yet. The spectroscopy reduction code builds off existing calibration spectra, and can include automated line identification. It propagates uncertainties through the pipeline and can display S/N images.
Other options for reducing spectrograph data include PypeIt (developed by X. Prochaska with a significant number of supporting helpers) and PyReduce. Eric B. reported that he tried to get PypeIt working with DIS data and had limited success; if someone wants to build on what he started it is possible, but it's a complex piece of software. Kevin reported that his group is using CERES to reduce ARCES data: https://github.com/rabrahm/ceres.
Nancy will be providing updates on various instrumentation initiatives every two months, or when otherwise needed.
Regarding Ocotillo, Sarah reported that she and her team are preparing for the Preliminary Design Review. They are conducting in-lab testing to finalize some hardware preferences. Caleb is putting together the fiber feed connections for the NA2 port. For the multi-object portion with robotically positioned fibers as well as for the integral field unit, traditionally one would build fiber bundles. Sarah, working with some collaborators at LBNL, is currently exploring the option of using cleaved fibers that would then be bundled, which would keep the throughput high across the entire bandpass. She will notify the Users Committee once they are preparing to do the PDR with the observatory staff and will provide summary documents to the Users Committee after that.
Plans for a multi-band imager are still being formulated, and require discussions with the UVa instrument team to flesh out how such an instrument would fit into their planned progression of instrument development efforts.
Regarding a new echelle spectrograph, a small team from JHU and UVa is working on a conceptual design. In parallel with that, Nancy is assembling a small tiger team of active echelle users to outline the science requirements that will flow down to instrument performance requirements, and to help develop the science case(s) that will be used to pursue external funding for the instrument. She is seeking 1-2 more echelle users for the tiger team, so Users Committee members were asked to forward this information to their department members and let her know if they have any recommendations or volunteers who would be willing to serve on this team.
There is one unassigned date remaining in the Q1 schedule (Mar 27B), for which we have already received a request. High priority requests will still be considered; a decision on how to allocate this time will likely be made next week.
The Q2 schedule is in draft form and is nearly complete; we expect to be able to publish it before the end of this week. In Q2 we are expecting 3 visiting instrument runs (with 2 different instruments) along with 4 on-site class groups. There were not too many programs that requested numerous partial nights (e.g. for a monitoring program) but we did receive requests from quite a few programs requiring observing time for specific events on specific dates that cross the midnight (A/B half) boundary, which means there ended up being lots of partial nights in the schedule. We are awaiting answers to a couple of outstanding questions and then the schedule will be published.
We only have one person signed up for the Q2 remote training opportunity that we offer for postdocs, research faculty, etc. so we may not offer a remote training in Q2. Despite our requests to receive notification about remote training needs well in advance of building the schedule (this information is conveyed every quarter in the allocation emails sent to the institutional schedulers), we generally receive these requests well after the schedule is made, which is problematic. Users Committee: please poll your department users and if there is a need for a remote training option for Q2, notify Russet ASAP (within the next day or so).
The Q1 ARCSAT schedule has some open slots. UC reps: please remind your users that they should notify us if their plans change and they will not use their ARCSAT time. We recognize that sometimes people make last-minute decisions based on weather and that's fine; we're asking that if someone decides to not make use of their entire week of scheduled time, they notify Russet, Nancy, and Ben. This can help us by avoiding unnecessary instrument changes and scheduling ARCSAT engineering time to fill the schedule gaps.
Open action items from previous meetings:
New action items from this meeting:
None.
The next meeting will be on Tuesday April 4, 10:30 am MST.