The ING Newsletter No. 1, September 1999
GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION TELESCOPE TIME
Previous: The ING Service Scheme: Performance and Feedback from Users | Up: Table of Contents | Next: Other Recent ING Publications
IV Site Managers' MeetingGordon Talbot (ING)
The Isaac Newton Group has recently hosted the IV Site Managers' Meeting in La Palma. The aim of this meeting (as with the previous ones) is for the principals of operations at various observatories to share common problems and their solutions with others who have similar challenges. The meeting's organisers are: Bruce Gillespie – Apache Point, Dave Sawyer – WIYN (Kitt Peak) and Mark Adams – McDonald Observatory.
The history of the meeting was explained by Bruce Gillespie: "A small handful of us happened to be at the same SPIE meeting in Hawaii a couple of years ago, and over beers or breakfast we discovered it would be useful to periodically get together at each others' observatories to discuss common ground and problems. Observatories tend to 'live' in relative isolation, and we discovered that we had all re-invented the wheel more than once, and that by sharing our experience we could each improve our lot without the extra work. Besides it's useful to visit other observatories to see how things are done.
Anyway we decided to meet first at McDonald observatory and to keep the meetings small, informal and low maintenance. The second and third meetings at Apache Point and Palomar were each a little bigger, but not so that the original charter was compromised. We did grow to nearly a couple of dozen in size, including representatives from Hawaii, Chile and Europe as well as space astronomy and radio observatories".
As well as the organisers, the meeting attracted representatives from (approximately west to east) Keck Observatory, Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), Lick Observatory, Palomar Observatory, National Solar Observatory, Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), ROYAC, Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC), and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). There was an invitation from the organisers for general participation of ING staff, and a good number were able to attend.
The format for the meeting held on the 28 to 30 July was two days of discussions, broken by a full day tour of not just ING's facilities at the Roque de los Muchachos but also tours of ROYAC, TNG and NOT. Topics presented included: GTC maintenance plan, Keck preventative maintenance plan, man-made seeing at the NOT, ING dome seeing programme, the ING engineering operations team, optics cleaning and results, Year 2000 readiness and visiting instruments.
The aim for informal discussion was soon achieved. The introduction where each delegate was asked to briefly describe their institution, their position and responsibilities, generated so many questions and discussion that it took up the whole morning session of four hours!. It was generally agreed that there wasn't enough time to fully talk about the subjects on the agenda, much less the reserve topics, which were held over to next time, or the time after that. These topics are:
- Laser operation at astronomical observatories.
- Site performance monitoring.
- Performance metrics for telescopes.
- Safety procedures and compliance issues.
- Staff performance appraisals.
- Maintaining a safe and civil work environment.
- Volunteer support at observatories.
- RFI suppression.
- Light pollution.
- Government and local interactions.
- Telescope operation standard nomenclature.
- Computer and network security.
- Operations budgets.
- Engineering time policies.
- Engineering and environmental issues.The meetings themselves were held in the Hotel Taburiente at Los Cancajos. ING also arranged the meeting dinner to which delegates and their guests together with ING staff and their families were invited. This was a great success – 137 people turned up.
ING would like to thank first of all the organisers for accepting our invitation to come, ROYAC (Goran Hosinsky), TNG (Adriano Ghedina) and NOT (Hugo Schwarz) for the tours of their facilities. I would like to thank all ING staff that helped and contributed including particularly Doug Gray, Alan Chopping and Clive Jackman for the tour and other help, Mavi Hernández for organising lunch at the Residencia and Chris Packham for his talk. Also Rachael Miles deserves a special mention for arrangements for travel, meeting room bookings, other catering arrangements and especially running round at the last minute for things I had forgotten.
For the future a fifth Site Managers' Meeting is provisionally planned for next year in late May at Kitt Peak. Dave Sawyer of WIYN will host. It is also planned to publicise the group further at the SPIE conference in Munich (March 2000) and seek wider participation. Particularly the hope is to extend the information exchange with Europe and the Southern hemisphere.
Currently information is disseminated via an e-mail exploder, 'mountain_honcho', but in the future a web page is planned. Anyone interested in the group and or the next meeting should contact Bruce Gillespie (gillespi@apo.nmsu.edu), Mark Adams (mta@astro.as.utexas.edu) or Dave Sawyer (dsawyer@noao.edu).
Email contact: Gordon Talbot (rgt@ing.iac.es)
Previous: The ING Service Scheme: Performance and Feedback from Users | Up: Table of Contents | Next: Other Recent ING Publications
GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION TELESCOPE TIME © Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes