Notes, 2014 September 11

We will meet at the regular time tomorrow. A good many activities have been taking place in the past couple of weeks, on which I hope we'll receive updates. We must also begin serious planning for the December solar observing campaign and, for those of us going down to Chile, travel plans should be initiated soon.

Agenda
  1. update on SD fast scanning tests (Richard Hills)
    • There are some slides on the Twiki page which I will use for the first item. See https://wikis.alma.cl/bin/view/CSV/FastSingleDishMappingObservatoryCalibration third paragraph.
      • TB: The results on these slides look very promising! Were these data obtained using one of the two MD settings? Or are examples of both presented? Impressive that you could do a full map of the Sun (2000" box dimension) in 500 s. I assume some of the smaller maps were much faster? Did you have a chance to exercise the filter wheel loads to calibrate T_ant? Anyway, I hope you can walk us through some of this tomorrow. I am sure a few of us will be happy to crunch some of the data (e.g., interpolate the various scan patterns onto a regular grid with corrections for varying sky opacity deduced by some devious means).
      • RH: We were not using the "MD" settings - that is still to be added for this type of observing. The "small" maps - 600" diameter with 5" nominal spacing - take about 200 seconds to cover the region. The observations were actually 400 seconds long so they should contain two passes over the map area. The data on the Hot and Ambient loads was taken but I have not used it in what I showed. In fact there was a blunder in taking these data in that I did not move the beam far enough off the Sun to observe the sky brightness, which is needed to derive the atmospheric transmission, so there will be large errors on any solar brightness temperatures I derive from them, quite apart from non-linearity issues.
      • HH: An item that had not come up at the telecon just now: there was a successful solar pointing of the NuSTAR hard X-ray observatory last night, under conditions described as an "intense engineering test." The team was hoping for solar-minimum conditions but found itself facing the aftermath of a colossal flare. In any case things seem to have worked, and this observatory might also make a contribution during the December time frame. See http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/page/sun for some of the motivation.
  2. further ALMA MD mode tests 3.1 (Masumi Shimojo)
    • new tests of MD solar 1 were performed
    • scripts have been prepared to allow execution of MD solar 2 tests in the coming days
  3. Solar observing campaign: December 9-16 (Tim Bastian)
    • travel contacts: Ann Edmunds (aedmunds@alma.cl - for travel in Santiago, hotel); Suitay Chang (schang@alma.cl - for travel to site)
    • need to determine list of tests and science verification activities
    • need to determine roles and responsibilities of those coming to Chile for the campaign (Shimojo, Bastian, White, Yan from NA; Barta, Brajsa from EU)
    • need to determine interests and roles of team members interested in working with data (but not present in Chile)
    • request to Bart DePontieu for IRIS support during campaign - done; request to Sasha Kosovichev for BBSO support via Dale Gary)
  4. meetings, simulations (Sven Wedemeyer; Tim Bastian)
    • ESPM meeting is this week, so possible Sven won't make it
    • Both he and Miro Barta presented papers on solar studies with ALMA at the meeting
    • AAS abstracts due Oct 1 for winter meeting in Seattle
  5. coordination with EU group (Tim Bastian)
    • met with Laing, Brajsa, Barta last Friday for discussion/coordination
  6. AOB

-- AnthonyRemijan - 2014-09-13
Topic revision: r1 - 2014-09-13, AnthonyRemijan
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