and don’t be shy with your contributions!
At the time of writing, the form
hosts about 20 individual topic
threads with a few dozen postings
and replies or followups. It also has
half a dozen scripts and packages,
links to reduction cookbooks (some
by Gemini staff, some by users), and
some general threads directed at
answering specific queries.
The Users’ Committee for Gemini
will be looking at all the postings
and selecting the winners of the
Discretionary Time competition.
GeMS Laser News
Figure 2.
A screen-capture
showing the Data
Reduction Forum
homepage.
best two contributions received in the first
few months!
The forum has a simple interface (Figure 2),
using tags to keep track of topics by type,
and is intended to provide a user-supported, and more open, complement to the
Helpdesk — which will remain operated as
always, by the National Gemini Offices and
Gemini staff.
The forum is young, but already there have
been quite a few postings by users, and
some useful scripts (e.g. for Integral Field
Unit data analysis, Gemini Near-Infrared
Spectrograph, cross-dispersed spectroscopy, general imaging reduction, etc.) by
both users and Gemini staff alike. If you’re a
graduate student involved in Gemini data,
or a seasoned veteran with your own package to contribute, take a look at this forum
18
GeminiFocus
As users of the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS)
are probably aware, the March run
of the instrument had to be cancelled on short notice. The reason: a
major loss of power from the laser,
which nominally projects 50 Watts
of sodium yellow light into the sodium layer
of Earth’s atmosphere and produces the five
guide stars for GeMS. A laser specialist engineer from Lockheed Martin came to the
Cerro Pachón site and worked with our staff
to restore the laser power. At the time of writing, the laser is running at 30W, just going
into the April GeMS run; this is not as good as
hoped for and further work is being planned.
Operations Working Group
Meets in Hilo
In February, the Operations Working Group
held its 26th meeting in Hilo, just before issuing the 2014B call for proposals. From this
meeting emerged a number of resolutions
and actions, including an agreement that,
for users requiring good seeing, we relax
the full-width at half-maximum values cor-
April 2014