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From the NSO Director's Office (1Sep95)
(from NSO, NOAO Newsletter No. 43, September 1995)

This quarter continues to show great activity at NSO. Personnel
changes, GONG deployment, telescope/instrument improvements, and the
by-now-usual budget reduction exercises take a prominent place. This
quarter included the annual presentations of plans and progress at
NSF, presentations at the AURA Board meetings, at the Solar Physics
Division meeting, and at the AURA Observatory Council meeting. The
AURA Observatory Council and the AURA Executive Committee met at Sac
Peak.

                        GONG Deployment Continues

The Tenerife, Learmonth, Mauna Loa and Tucson GONG stations are now
operating successfully as an extended "GONG mini-network." The CTIO,
Big Bear and Udaipur sites are being prepared; the instruments are
being shipped to, or have already arrived on, these sites for an
anticipated full deployment of all GONG stations by the end of
September. Relatively minor "teething" problems have been overcome,
and quality data are being received at the Tucson data processing
facility for analysis and distribution to the GONG users.

                         Keller Joins NSO Staff

I am most pleased to announce that on July 1 Christoph Keller joined
the NSO staff. Christoph had already been with us for 18 months as a
postdoc funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research
centers around the physics of the smallest observable structures in
the solar atmosphere and on precise differential solar photometric
techniques. His earlier high angular resolution observations using
differential speckle interferometry are well known. Recently
Christoph, often in collaboration with others, has obtained
outstanding observations of solar surface structures using phase
diversity techniques, line polarization at visible and infrared
wavelengths, and the green- and red-line corona. Christoph will be
living in Tucson. His service functions will center around NSO/KP, but
he expects to carry on his research at both NSO/KP and NSO/SP.

                     VTT Images Continue to Improve

Continuing improvements of the thermal control of the VTT window have
started paying off in improved images. At his latest observing run,
Thomas Rimmele broke the 0.2" resolution barrier with images showing
structures of 0.15" in size near sunspots at 470 nm. Using image
selection techniques, high quality images can be obtained at many
times during the day. Keller, in collaboration with Seldin and Paxman,
using phase diversity image reconstruction techniques, obtained
outstanding time sequences of the solar surface structure in and near
the Ha and the Mg b-lines. Radick and Rimmele obtained year-end
funding from the USAF Phillips lab to purchase a deformable mirror.
Together with his development of a relatively slow Hartmann-Shack
wave-front sensor, Rimmele plans to implement an active optics system
at the VTT to remove the residual optical aberrations in the
telescope. It is rapidly becoming clear that diffraction from the 76
cm VTT aperture is becoming the limiting factor in doing solar
research at Sac Peak. Even in the best images, many structures remain
unresolved.

                          FY 1996 Budget Issues

The internal NOAO budget planning for FY 1996 is starting unusually
early this year. The outlook is for another 5 to 6% budget reduction
(including inflation) for NSO in this next fiscal year. This follows
the two 5% cuts that NSO had to absorb already since I took up my
position less than two years ago, and precedes additional, similar
annual cuts for a number of years to follow. Although not as drastic
as the budget reductions NASA funded institutes are facing, these cuts
present a major challenge to the NSO program. "Doing more with less"
is a good slogan, but it requires magic to make it happen. In this
ever decreasing budget environment, it is essential to have a clear
image of where we want to be heading, so that a targeted restructuring
of the program is possible. In the meantime, efforts in attracting
separate resources to support important activities at NSO, which are
less central to NSO's future goals, have been successful at least as
far as the support of the laboratory astrophysics/chemistry program
for the McMath-Pierce FTS goes. A substantial grant from the NSF
Chemistry Division will guarantee the health of that program for at
least three years to come. The continued funding for the Solar-Stellar
program at the McMath-Pierce in FY 1996 is still uncertain. It was
removed from the NSO budget in FY 1995 in response to the previous
budget cut, and is supported presently with separate funds from the
NOAO Director's office. The additional 5 to 6% budget cut for FY 1996
mentioned above will not allow reinstatement of that program; in fact,
it will result in an additional restructuring of NSO so that it can
best fulfill its mission even at a lower support level.

                        The Restructuring of NSO

As already mentioned in the last Newsletter, AURA is asking NSF to
commission a high-level study of the future plans for ground-based
solar astronomy, probably by the National Academy of Sciences/National
Research Council. NSF has responded favorably to that request, and
such a study will probably be started in the near future. To prepare
for that, the AURA Observatory Council (previously named the
Observatory Advisory Committee) has formed a Solar Subcommittee, which
includes as non-NSO scientists Art Walker (chair), Bob Rosner, Alan
Title, Juri Toomre and O. Richard White. It is expected that this
committee will meet soon together with NSO/NOAO staff (J. Beckers, J.
Kuhn, D. Rabin, and S. Wolff) and M. Knoelker (HAO Director).

In the meantime, a number of activities are being pursued within NSO
that will probably be components of any restructuring of the
observatory. As described in my report at the recent Solar Physics
Division meeting in Memphis, our current planning is based on three
legs. The first leg focuses on making our existing facilities work as
well as possible (better imaging, better detectors, best GONG
commissioning and operation, implementation of RISE/PSPT). The second
leg focuses on making a major breakthrough in the next decade and a
half in our understanding of the solar activity cycle and its effects
on earth using GONG, RISE/PSPT and our existing synoptic facilities.
The third leg aims at the creation of a major new solar research
facility for individual research projects. Restructuring within NSO
aims at making our facilities both more economical to operate and more
capable. Jack Harvey and Larry November are presently taking the lead
in defining a better, more economical solar synoptic facility to be
part of the second leg. As part of the third leg, Jeff Kuhn, Don
Neidig, Doug Rabin, Thomas Rimmele, Ray Smartt and myself are pursuing
the study of the CLEAR telescope concept, a 4-meter-class aperture
telescope capable of high angular resolution studies of both the solar
disk and the solar corona at wavelengths ranging from the visible to
the far infrared.

Jacques Beckers

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