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A Year of Change for KPNO (1Mar95) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 41, 1 March 1995) 1995 is a year of fundamental change for KPNO, bringing a new philosophy of operations for our telescopes that we hope will provide new science opportunities for our user community. The changes we describe here in this Newsletter are driven by many factors: input from you, our users, the realities of life in the Gemini era, the recommendations of the OIR Panel chaired by Richard McCray, and the constant pressure of the budget. The Panel Report advocates both the importance of competitive access to national telescopes and identifies the role of KPNO to support visitors at KPNO telescopes, to operate and optimize the performance of several telescopes - especially WIYN, and to develop first-class instruments. The members of the KPNO Users Committee, chaired by John Salzer, has played a key role in the development of new models for KPNO, and we are grateful for their help and advice. The vision of KPNO that guides our planning is one that maintains access to competitive facilities while allowing us to focus more resources on upgrading and modernizing our facilities for the future. The goal of the changes is to increase the scientific productivity of our telescopes. Many of you have written of the difficulty of completing your programs due to short observing runs, bad weather, and the changing TAC competition level each semester. We are proposing new operations modes on both the large (4-m, WIYN) telescopes and the small (2.1-m, Coude‚ Feed, 0.9-m, and Burrell Schmidt) telescopes to help observers complete programs within a single observing season. Budget pressure over many years has led us to increase run lengths on all our telescopes. This change has forced an unnatural uniformity in the scope of projects proposed for KPNO telescopes. New procedures will encourage a broad range of programs to be undertaken on Kitt Peak. While traditional observing runs are the bread and butter of optical ground-based observers, we have learned from our space astronomy colleagues the value of service and queue-scheduled observing. Expanded opportunities provided by queue and service observing at Kitt Peak should enrich all areas of astronomy. Instrumentation changes so quickly today and is so complex that some users have difficulty taking full advantage of the scientific capabilities we offer. The new styles of operations described here should assist our users in obtaining the most science from the state-of-the-art instrumentation provided by the NOAO Instrumentation Program. Our users have also spoken eloquently of the need for small telescopes. To preserve these capabilities in the face of serious budget constraints, we are placing more reliance on our users for operations of the small telescopes. In the longer term, we hope to shift the model for the use of small telescopes from the traditional observing runs to one of "experiments" on dedicated facilities carried out in collaboration with universities and other institutions. The closing of the 1.3-m telescope is our first opportunity to try this approach, and we welcome proposals from our user community to support this telescope for major programs. The 3.5-m WIYN telescope is the first new large telescope for KPNO since the Mayall 4-m telescope was dedicated in 1973. The WIYN project has demonstrated the value of modern technology as well as the true quality of the Kitt Peak site in obtaining outstanding image quality and good performance. The WIYN telescope should be only the first step in our program to modernize KPNO facilities. One obvious next step is to build a twin of the WIYN telescope; this new telescope would allow KPNO to specialize each of the three 4-m class telescopes on Kitt Peak to lower operating costs while still providing the broad range of scientific capabilities needed to support ground-based optical astronomy. For example, with three 4-m class telescopes, we could dedicate the Mayall 4-m to infrared astronomy at the Cassegrain focus and wide field-CCD imaging at the prime focus. The WIYN telescope could continue to offer multi-fiber spectroscopy and deep imaging. The WIYN-Twin could be specialized for low resolution slitlet spectroscopy, fiber-fed high resolution spectroscopy, and more deep imaging. We are actively pursuing funding opportunities to build the WIYN-Twin. The modernization of observing facilities on Kitt Peak must remain a high priority if we are to continue to meet the needs of you, our users. We appreciate very much the OIR Panel recommendation in support of this goal. In the following articles we describe in detail the new style of operations for Kitt Peak telescopes and offer strategies for success in writing telescope proposals. Caty Pilachowski
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