Previous Article Next Article Table of Contents
KPNO Users Committee Report (1Jun94) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 38, 1 June 1994) The Users Committee met in Tucson on 7 and 8 December 1993. The Committee members present were William Keel (Alabama), Elizabeth Lada (Maryland), Harold McAlister (Georgia State), Frazer Owen (NRAO/Socorro), Abi Saha (STScI), and John Salzer (Wesleyan). Rosemary Wyse (Johns Hopkins) could not be present for the meeting. Seth Tuttle, who is the NSF Program Manager for NOAO, also attended the sessions. During the two-day meeting, which included a half-day joint session with the CTIO Users' Committee, we were presented with a variety of reports covering many aspects of KPNO management, operations, and planning. The review of ground-based optical/IR astronomy, with an emphasis on NOAO, requested by the NSF was also described to us. This report contains a summary of the presentations we heard and our specific recommendations regarding KPNO facilities. Beyond these operational suggestions, we are deeply concerned with the potential impact of the forthcoming review, and we close this report with a statement of our concerns. Presentation Summary The current management approach was described by the three Co-Directors: Caty Pilachowski, who oversees administrative tasks; George Jacoby, who handles mountain issues; and Todd Boroson, who provides leadership to instrumentation projects and who also serves as liaison to the Gemini project. The Co-Directors' presentations were followed by status reports in response to the Committee's recommendations made following our 1992 meeting as described in the NOAO Newsletter (March 1993, No. 33, p.37). Bruce Bohannan reported that mountain staffing remains "one- person deep" in every technical area, a potentially serious problem for which present levels of funding do not appear to offer a solution. Taft Armandroff reported on the status of spectrograph camera upgrades, and he and Ian Gatley described potential partnership possibilities involving KPNO. Of particular interest is a collaborative effort with the US Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station to build a 1024 X 1024 InSb array. Dave De Young, who continues to oversee the TAC process, told the Committee that our recommendation for specific responses to applicants who were not allocated observing time had now been fully implemented. Todd Boroson reported on queue scheduling experiments at the 2.1-m and 0.9-m telescopes during the summer and fall of 1993 which provided valuable insights into the realities of this approach. Phil Massey reviewed the upgrade at the 4-m telescope. Bruce Bohannan told us that the "save-the-bits" program, a minimalist approach to data archiving, was now routine. In addition to these updates from last year, the Committee heard reports on: Gemini instrumentation from Todd Boroson; the activities of the O/UV and IR programs from Taft Armandroff and Ian Gatley; various telescope projects from Todd Boroson including programs for constructing large format, mosaiced CCDs; the improvement of seeing and image quality from Ron Probst; mountain operations from Bruce Bohannan; the 4-m renovation project from Phil Massey; the status of the WIYN telescope from Dave Silva; and the use of IRAF/ICE on the mountain from Bruce Bohannan. A session devoted to proposals and TAC issues was led by Dave De Young, who described changes in the TAC and scheduling processes that should increase the efficiency in these areas. Phil Massey described a new, shorter proposal form that permits electronic submission, and Todd Boroson commented further on queue scheduling with its mix of advantages and disadvantages. The Co-Directors presented the Committee with an initial summary of the responses to the questionnaire electronically mailed to the user community this fall. At the time of the meeting, KPNO had received 164 responses from the 500+ recipients. Highlights from this initial analysis showed that access to instrumentation is the most cited reason for applying for Kitt Peak time, even in cases where users have telescope access through their home institutions. Slightly more than half of the respondents use federal support for travel and 13% do not apply due to lack of any available travel funding. There is a strong interest in queue observing, a preference for 3-night 4-m runs, and a continuing program of short (2-4 week) student visits to Tucson in connection with telescope access. The responses show a high level of satisfaction with visitor support, with the reliability of telescopes and instrumentation, and with related documentation. When asked to rank what they saw as being most important for the future, users overwhelmingly selected "keeping the telescopes open" as the single highest priority item, followed by maintaining a strong instrumentation and detector program, maintaining excellence in visitor support, the continued support for IRAF, and the implementation of non-traditional approaches to scheduling. The Budget During the joint CTIO/KPNO session, Hugh Van Horn, the new Director of the Division of Astronomical Sciences at NSF, reported on the NSF budget picture. He anticipates level funding for astronomy into the future and pointed out that big telescope projects and flat funding preclude a "business as usual" approach to ground-based astronomy. He described the charge made to an Optical/IR Review Committee to be constituted under the National Academy's Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics. The Review Committee will assess the coming decade of activity in optical/IR astronomy and in doing so will carefully examine the mission of NOAO. It will provide specific recommendations to NSF for optimizing scientific progress and improving the effectiveness of NSF support for astronomy. These recommendations will be made to NSF by 1 January 1995. We will return to this topic in the closing paragraphs of this report. Van Horn's comments were followed by Sidney Wolff who addressed the NOAO FY 1994 budget picture and long-range plans and provided a status report on the Gemini project, which she considers to be central to the future of NOAO, seeing the US Gemini Office as potentially a fourth division within NOAO. She also envisions a substantial reorientation of Kitt Peak and Tucson operations in support of Gemini. In connection with planning for the future, George Jacoby reported on an internal series of staff workshops under a program called "NOAO 2000" which are aimed at identifying priorities in the Gemini era, preparing a plan for NOAO leadership in the US community, and preparing for the NSF review of NOAO. As a result of this review, the AURA contract for NOAO management, which normally would have itself been reviewed for renewal consideration this year, has been extended for an additional two years to take it through the 1994 O/IR Review Committee process. Committee Recommendations In executive sessions, the Users' Committee formulated specific recommendations and concerns that were presented to the Co-Directors at the end of the meeting. These issues are summarized in the remaining paragraphs of this report. Intrinsic Seeing Evaluation It has become a well documented fact that effective seeing of less than one arcsec is routinely obtained by some telescopes on Kitt Peak, destroying the myth that it is not a good seeing site. We note the success of the mountain effort to improve dome seeing conditions and image quality through 10 fm imaging of heat sources and through routine monitoring of collimation. These actions are winning significant gains in this fundamentally important area. We recommend that in addition to continuing this effort, KPNO undertake the determination of the intrinsic seeing conditions on Kitt Peak. This will not only define the limit to be pursued by the image quality monitoring effort, but will furnish proof of the viability of Kitt Peak as a prime observing site. Mountain Staffing The Committee continues to be very concerned about the one-person depth of mountain staffing. We commend the mountain staff, under Bruce Bohannan's leadership, for the fine job they do, but it is only a matter of time before the thinly stretched staff will encounter circumstances it cannot handle. This is a very fragile situation, and we hope that funds can be identified to provide some degree of staff expansion on the mountain. Spectrograph Cameras We reiterate our recommendation from last year that priority be given to maintaining and upgrading existing spectrographs, especially in the cases of GoldCam and in a plan for a 4-m instrument obtained either by fixing CryoCam or providing for a replacement. We believe that the current budget situation lends difficulty in justifying a new fiber- fed instrument for the 4-m telescope. Queue Scheduling This approach to obtaining data offers many advantages that can promote observing efficiency while saving money. The experiences with queue scheduling during 1993 were a mixed success, but we believe the advantages can outweigh the disadvantages. We thus encourage the Observatory to continue exploring the process. Because WIYN will have extensive queuing of proposed science, the methodology will ultimately be perfected there. The innovations discovered by WIYN can be exported to the scheduling of other Kitt Peak telescopes. User Survey We strongly applaud the e-mail survey of the user community as well as the obvious intention of the Co-Directors to pay careful attention to the results of the survey. The committee looks forward to seeing a detailed discussion of this survey. KPNO Directorship The Committee is very pleased with the energetic commitment to the Observatory shown by the Co-Directors, and we congratulate them for the fine jobs they did in this capacity. Shortly after the Committee met in Tucson, two of the Co-Directors took on other responsibilities so that KPNO now has a single Acting Director, Caty Pilachowski. We encourage the NOAO Director to move quickly towards the appointment of a permanent KPNO Director. CAA Review of NOAO Since various subsets of the US community have access to significant private northern-hemisphere optical facilities, we are concerned that KPNO appears uniquely vulnerable during the CAA review. We urge a careful examination of the observatory's operations and facilities, and that the review committee be as accurately informed as possible of the costs and productivity of KPNO facilities. We note that the KPNO management already assembled some such material for the Town Meeting at the Washington AAS meeting in January. The very characteristics of KPNO users, many of whom are junior and therefore less influential in setting national astronomy priorities and who are often completely dependent on national facilities, means that this review could have a dramatic effect on decades of astronomy to come. It is crucial that the review incorporate the needs of today's real users rather than a perhaps dated perception of their needs. It is imperative that the broadest possible community input and consensus be obtained on these decisions. Any acceptable solution to the funding quandary must be generated by the community rather than imposed by a minority. A catalyst for the CAA Committee appears to be a memorandum written by Sandra Faber in which she has suggested radical alterations in the operation of KPNO, including the privatization of the observatory. Our Committee feels that the very existence of KPNO is threatened by the current financial climate as well as by a political situation in which universities are competing directly with KPNO for funding, rather than collaborating with KPNO to ensure that the maximum amount of forefront science is done with available federal funding, and to continue to allow all the scientific community access to state-of-the-art instrumentation and facilities. The entire optical/IR user community must become aware of the situation and make their views known (pro or con). To bring people up to date, we hope to obtain Faber's permission to widely circulate her memorandum among the KPNO user community. We strongly urge all users of KPNO to consider the contents of her memo and the implications for future access to telescopes, and to become active participants in the committee process by communicating their opinions to the CAA Committee Chair, Richard McCray (oirpanel@jila.colorado.edu). Once again, we encourage users of Kitt Peak National Observatory to take advantage of this Committee as a formal means of communication with the Kitt Peak and NOAO management. It is our experience that the Users' Committee does indeed play a useful role in representing the user community and that our opinions are given careful attention by the KPNO staff. The continuing members of the committee will be: Bill Keel keel@bildad.astr.ua.edu Elizabeth Lada lada@astro.umd.edu John Salzer slaz@parcha.astro.wesleyan.edu Rosie Wyse wyse%wyser@jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu Hal McAlister (Georgia State, Chair)
Previous Article Next Article Table of Contents