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KPNO Users' Committee Report (1Mar93)
(from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 33, 1 March 1993)

The Users' Committee met in Tucson on 15 and 16 October 1992. The
Committee members present were William Keel (U. of Alabama), Harold
McAlister (Georgia State U.), Frazer Owen (NRAO/Socorro), Abi Saha
(STScI), John Salzer (Wesleyan U.), and Rosemary Wyse (Johns Hopkins
U.).  Tony Tyson (ATT/Bell Labs) could not be present for the meeting
but participated periodically in the meeting by conference call. Kent
Wilson and Seth Tuttle, both of NSF, attended some of our sessions.
David De Young was present throughout the two-day meeting except during
executive sessions.

The meeting agenda was quite similar to that reported in the 1 March
1992 NOAO Newsletter (No. 29, page 23). The Committee was presented
with reports on the first day from Bruce Bohannan on mountain
operations, George Jacoby on the 4-m upgrade project, Todd Boroson on
optical/UV detectors, Sam Barden on the Hydra fiber positioner and
multi-object spectrograph, and Ian Gatley on the IR program status.
During a joint meeting with the CTIO Users' Committee, both groups
heard comments from Acting NSF Astronomy Division Director Kent Wilson
regarding the current status of the Division and its plans for
recruiting a permanent Director. Dr. Wilson also speculated on the
possible near-term funding scenarios for NSF astronomy. Richard Green
reported on the NOAO budget status and prospects and how the
Observatories might react to restricted levels of funding. Sidney Wolff
and Pat Osmer described the status of the Gemini project and introduced
Dr. Matt Mountain, the newly appointed Gemini Project Scientist. The
joint meeting ended with a discussion, led by Bob Williams, of possible
revisions to the CTIO TAC procedures, a topic addressed separately in
the CTIO Users' Committee report. The first day's meeting ended with an
executive session.

The second day began with a discussion of KPNO TAC policy and continued
with status reports from Doug Tody on IRAF, Steve Grandi on Central
Computer Services, and Matt Johns and Caty Pilachowski on the WIYN
telescope. At the request of the Committee, Sidney Wolff returned for a
discussion of how Gemini might impact KPNO, a topic which was continued
in a follow-on discussion with Dave De Young.

Rather than present a detailed summary of the material presented to the
Users' Committee in the series of presentations we heard, the remainder
of this report will focus on the concerns and recommendations expressed
to the Kitt Peak Director by the Committee. This departs somewhat from
the tradition of these reports, but we note that all of the topics
presented to us are frequently and excellently reported to the user
community on the pages of this Newsletter.

The Viability of Kitt Peak: Improvements in the imaging performance of
Kitt Peak telescopes and in the mountain infrastructure are clearly
demonstrating the viability of Kitt Peak as a world-class observing
site. Kitt Peak will continue to be crucial to the diversity of
astronomical science as conducted in the US. Image quality is basic to
the optimization of instrument performance.  The Committee applauds and
strongly endorses the efforts of the mountain staff to implement a
program of routine monitoring of collimation and the elimination of
dome seeing sources in order to take advantage of the intrinsic seeing
quality on Kitt Peak. Such a program is long overdue.

Mountain Operations: The operation of the Kitt Peak facilities has been
quantitatively and qualitatively improved under the leadership of Bruce
Bohannan as Mountain Manager. The Committee applauds the enthusiastic
and energetic manner in which Bruce has approached virtually every
aspect of his job, and we note a substantial improvement in the morale
of mountain employees. We continue to be concerned with the "one-person
depth" of mountain staffing forced by budgetary pressures over the
years. The mountain technical staff certainly cannot stand any further
reductions when the staffing situation is already at this critically
thin level.

O/UV and IR Programs: Instrumentation and detector developments within
the O/UV and IR programs show the unique and powerful expertise of NOAO
to conceive, design, and produce frontline instrumentation possessing
flexibility and ease of use. In addition to the superb work being
carried out within these programs, we encourage the development of
better spectrograph cameras to fully utilize the large format CCDs now
available. We recognize that expertise now existing within the O/UV and
IR programs is a fragile commodity and that decreasing levels of
funding can potentially lead to a hiatus in these activities from which
a recovery would be difficult or impossible. In light of the current
bleak funding picture, we wish to stress the high priority we place in
the instrument and detector development programs for the long-term
health of the national observatory.

Institutional Partnerships: The Committee cautiously encourages KPNO to
explore potential partnerships with other institutions that might
enable the enhancement of telescopes and instrumentation through
resources not otherwise available to the Observatory.  We emphasize
that this is not an endorsement of the outright selling of telescope
time (or even the indirect selling of time to instrumentation groups
that are especially well funded), and that selection criteria for such
arrangements must be based upon the broad impact of the proposed
science and on the long-term enhancement of telescope instrumentation
for the user community. Careful consideration must also be given to the
possibility of displacing scientific programs already underway.
Scientific interests should always have priority over financial
interests in such partnerships.

The Advent of the WIYN Telescope: The WIYN Telescope is rapidly
becoming a reality, and the Committee continues to see this new
facility as a significant addition to Kitt Peak and its user community.
We hope that the WIYN partners can meet the financial schedule which
will enable the transfer of the Hydra Multi-Object Spectrograph to the
WIYN Telescope.

KPNO TAC Policy: The allocation of telescope time on the basis of
scientific merit is a fundamental role of a national observatory. The
process requires a considerable investment by Kitt Peak management,
support staff, and by community participation on the TAC. It has become
apparent through feedback from the user community, and most notably
through the electronic survey conducted in early 1992 by J.M. Hollis
and S.B. Howell, that the allocation process would be significantly
enhanced by providing comments to proposers following the meeting of
the TAC. (We note that the Hollis/Howell survey generally showed
satisfaction on the part of the 216 respondents with Kitt Peak services
and procedures. A majority thought KPNO is doing a satisfactory job
overall in handling proposals and allocating telescope time in spite of
the strong desire for feedback to proposers. We also note the relative
ease with which a wide segment of the community was reached and the
results tabulated, indicating the usefulness that future surveys of
this type might have to NOAO itself.)

The goal of the revised TAC procedure would be to provide an automatic
response of uniform quality to all proposers to replace the current
system of responding only to proposers upon request. The current system
requires a significant amount of Dave De Young's time, and responses
can only be sent 4 to 6 weeks after the request. The new system would
have the further goal of establishing more trust on the part of the
community in the fairness of the TAC system. It should be recognized
that some proposals are not scheduled simply due to their poor quality,
some good proposals are judged by the TAC to be not quite as good as
others and are declined because of oversubscription. Both classes of
declined proposals should know the specific shortcomings seen by the
TAC in their proposal, and a variety of methods might be applied to
recording and providing a summarization of the TAC comments to the
proposer.

We strongly urge Dave De Young to revise the system along some lines
that will satisfy the need for rapid feedback and recommend that a
trial procedure be in use for the spring 1993 TAC meeting.  We
specifically do not recommend using outside reviewers except when a
proposal is well outside the normal range of expertise found within a
TAC.  The CTIO experience with the use of large numbers of outside
reviewers shows that this is not particularly useful in a proposal
environment of heavy oversubscription such as is always the case at
CTIO and KPNO. An experiment conducted with KPNO 4-m scheduling in the
past also showed that outside reviews are not very useful unless the
reviewers see a significant fraction of the proposals.

Queue Scheduling and Service Observing: We encourage KPNO to experiment
with non-traditional scheduling strategies as a means for enhancing
scientific quality and quantity. Experience to be gained with KPNO
scheduling of their share of WIYN telescope time will be valuable to
this end. The overriding goal of such measures should be to preserve
the data flow from the mountain even if physical access to the
telescopes is diminished.

Improvements of Observing Efficiency:  The Committee encourages the
exploration of various means of enhancing observing efficiency through
such steps as frame grabbing to provide optimal focusing, determination
of a truss-temperature / telescope-position defocus lookup table,
automation of spectrograph rotation, increased speed of chip readout
and image storage, etc.  We note that the new 4-m TCS and servos will
make substantial progress towards this goal of observing efficiency.

Data Archiving: We strongly endorse the immediate initiation of a basic
"save the bits" data archival program on Kitt Peak. We recognize that
the full initiation of an archival and retrieval/distribution program
is a costly undertaking, but a basic archival process that could be
eventually expanded to a full scale system can be initiated right away.
We acknowledge Caty Pilachowski's efforts towards this goal.

Budgetary Prospects: All of us are aware that the budgetary future may
be a bleak one for US astronomy, and the prospects continue to evolve
as a result of numerous influences. While we do not know how the
federal budget will eventually impact NOAO in general and KPNO in
particular, we can definitely point to the underfunding that NOAO has
endured for years. The Observatories and their services are fundamental
to the health of US astronomy. They are also extremely fragile
institutions which have been operating on fraying shoestrings. Not only
are telescope closings a possibility if the budget continues to
deteriorate, but NOAO may lose sufficient infrastructure to permanently
damage or even destroy its capability for providing frontline
telescopes and instrumentation to US astronomers. Some budget cuts are
reversible while others are not, and we point out that further stifling
of instrumentation capabilities at KPNO could result in the permanent
loss of the capability. We encourage all astronomers to support NOAO in
its operation of Kitt Peak. While there may not be uniform agreement
about the optimal way of running a national observatory, it is clear to
this Committee that further erosion of support for NOAO could have
scientifically crippling consequences to a large fraction of US
astronomers.

We strongly encourage active and potential users of Kitt Peak National
Observatory to contact any or all Users' Committee members to express
your suggestions and concerns. True to our name, we are anxious to
represent the opinions of KPNO users to an observatory management which
continues to value and follow the advice of this Committee. To make
such contact easier, we close this report by providing e-mail addresses
of the current Committee members:

           Bill Keel, keel@bildad.astr.ua.edu
           Hal McAlister, hal@chara.gsu.edu
           Frazer Owen, fowen@aoc.nrao.edu
           Abi Saha, saha@stsci.edu
           John Salzer, slaz@parcha.astro.wesleyan.edu
           Tony Tyson, tyson@physics.att.com
           Rosie Wyse, wyse%wyser@jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu

Hal McAlister (Georgia State U.), Chair

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