2021-03-25 Meeting notes

1:03

words from John

John

• Vaccinations available to us in 1c

• 5 year plan presented to Board right after SSC meeting, endorsed by board

  • Money for LRIS Refurb in FY22

  • Funding plan for SCALES. John has confidence that we will see it. Baseline instrument only, no imager (yet).

• FY22 plan is also ramping up

  • Upgrades to control rooms

  • Need to present to Board in July for approval in November (after FY starts)

• When should we bring visiting astronomers back to observatory?

  • John would like to at the start of 21B (i.e. August)

1:11

words from Randy

Randy

• LRIS red on track

• Kyle:

  • LRIS will ship in two pieces; controller and computer around April 5th, detector and dewar on or near April 13th

• Percy:

  • Science grade detector being installed this week

  • More solid info following testing this week

• Will have CI projects again in FY22

• SA training going ok

• Jim: are we still on track for performance reviews?

  • Randy: some uncertainty due to Roy’s departure.

  • Will focus on goals for upcoming year.

1:21

coordinating Ops efforts with SSG

Randy

• SSG is led by John, Luca, Jeff Mader

• Other part of software is Kevin Tsubota’s group which does lower level and facility software

• Want to promote collaboration between SAs, OAs, and SSG

• How to come up with tasks which are done within the ops hours assigned to SSG

• When is an ECR needed? We need good s/w practices.

• Luca:

  • Yes, need good practices for software engineering

  • We used to have coordination group for this

• Is Instrument Task Group effective? If so, we can use a similar model.

• Randy: ITG may have some of these tasks already

  • Should we split ITG in to h/w, and another group for s/w

  • But we want to minimize meetings

• Luca: original SSCG tried to do this by using 2 reps from SAs to help other SAs then

• Jim: SSCG reps can help other SAs do their own software in appropriate cases and help them use good practices

• Randy: we should have kick off meeting to let people know what templates exist

• Jim: will help with organization: where things go in repo, name collisions, etc.

• Randy: Our group setting priorities would be good.

• Randy: reinstate SSCG Jira page and collect ideas

• Kyle: Grab content from John’s Project Rumsfeld: Addressing the known unknowns with the army you have

1:50

Observer Training

Jim

• Observers losing contact with physical nature of observatory

• KVSP aims to fix this, but can we do more with documentation?

• Josh: Split troubleshooting pages in to observer troubleshooting and SA troubleshooting?

• Kyle: don’t want too many troubleshooting pages

• John: Good topic. DSI may help see where things are stopping for no reason.

• Luca: need to encourage users to browse web pages

• Luca: more users are using outside manuals which get out of date

2:30

Pau!