2025-03-27 Meeting notes

1:00

Words from John

John

• Fiscal year planning starting in April, let John know if there are big changes. Trying to get some resources for AO refurbishment, will be reaching out to Jim Percy MaxS

• No update in DC chaos. John is in DC next week, find him on Slack.

• Keck Science Meeting is Sept 18-19 at UCLA. Which SA will be on the SOC this time?

1:07

Words from Jim

Jim

• Q2 reviews. Get them to me if you haven’t!

• EPICS gateway change (see Mar 24 Tsubota email). Check your EPICS_CA_ADDR_LISTs

• Encourage punchlist use

  • SAs who use them seem to benefit in prioritization

• SA candidate feedback (perhaps this should be a topic)

• Post-pier repair on-sky tests

  • HIRES/KPF tests (several emails from community; need to review)

  • Use COVID shutdown as model?

  • currently within a day of their original schedule (they built in 10 days of margin; that does translate into possibly 10 days of surprise observing support/engineering; late April)

  • currently engineering scheduled for April 23

1:42

SA/inst updates

All

• Challenges

• Wins

• Jim: by keeping ESI cold, the slit position is now dialed in with a procedure for future recenterings

• Carlos: DEIMOS rotator challenge - master link broke, replaced

• Greg: After NIRSPEC service, slit wheel works again, yay! Need to add a backlash component to the software when approaching positions from varying directions. Worm gear has a little more room now so that could be the cause. Kyle says there may already be a parameter that needs to be increased a bit.

• Leo: Gave a great donor talk! Had a good summit day fixing NIRSPEC and helping with KPF.

• MaxS: Keck2 OCAM science went pretty well. Trying to understand glycol flow faults, tune down or understand flow. Jim asks if there are any other AO/Nasmyth flow monitors?

• Percy: Working on NIRES detector, replacing the server

• Rosalie: DAR correction finally fixed for KCWI

• Michael: LRIS software looks, blue STOP will stop the one exposure but not the following exposures while red STOP stops the sequence. Added blue sequence STOP. Trying to get Dennis’s time on replacing the API but haven’t gotten his time.

• Randy: New assignments like how to know when Instruments are ready for UNO. Starting with LRIS and proceeding to other instruments. Also looking at AO new instrument software.

• Sherry: testing new XLRIS software, can move mechanisms, some scripts never committed to SVN and callback problems, but getting much closer to taking John’s dollar. OSIRIS has a new coldhead.

• Kyle: NIRSPEC bench heaters are now more stable after tuning of parameters. Now tuning KPF’s loops and getting much better performance. Being patient is hard.

• Grant: Pinwheel star! 4 Lakeshore harnesses finally working.

Pau

Next meeting lead: Carlos