As before, most comments written in the reports during period 38 were very positive, especially about the support from the staff.
There were some practical requests such as a new telephone for the control room, a list of phone numbers of other telescopes and a larger screen for the computer used by the observers for data viewing and analysis. It was also noted that the general observers' cookbook and its printer version were somewhat cumbersome to use. All these issue have been addressed in the mean time.
On the instrument side, there was a request to further streamline the target acquisition for FIES, which is something that is work in progress. The main issue raised was that with the set-up provided for spectropolarimetry with ALFOSC the duty cycle can be very poor for bright targets, which are the most likely to be chosen to reach the high signal-to-noise levels needed to detect the typically low values of polarization. For this we have changed the instrument set-up to improve the duty cycle without significantly affecting the use of the instrument for other polarimetry applications.
The TCS has a warning system that notifies the observers when the humidity or the wind speed is to high. It was requested if this can be expanded to also include a warning if there is a fast change in humidity or wind speed to alert the observers of possible unexpected changes in the weather. We are currently looking how best to implement this.
Thomas Augusteijn 2009-05-14