Comments recorded in End-Of-Night & End-Of-Run reports

As before, most comments written in the reports during period 39 were very positive, especially about the support from the staff.

There were several requests for improvements and/or enhancements to some of the (new) sequencer observing commands and scripts. As far as possible we have implement these changes, while some requests which require more work or which are more complicated are planned for the future.

Some comments were received about the ALFOSC and FIES webpages containing `too much' information which makes it hard to find the necessary information for observing. In both cases, a web-page with a `step-by-step' observing guide was made which provide all the necessary information in a single page.

For high-precision work with FIES it was noted that it would be good to get the intensity-weighted time of mid-exposure which can be derived from the measurements of the exposure-meter. As a stop-gap a little script was made to safe the measurements from the exposure meter to a file with the same base-name as the FIES spectrum which then will have to be analyzed separately. However, we plan to develop this further and provide the intensity-weighted time of mid-exposure as a standard FITS header in FIES exposures. It was also noted that for FIES the centering of the star on the fiber can have an effect on the $\sim$10 m/s level, where the movie of the fiber head provided for guiding could be used. We are looking at the possibility to make this a specific feature, but already in the current set-up it is relatively easy to make a sequencer script which saves these files which can then later be used for analysis.

Following a remark from an observer it was noted that observers should be informed by the support staff in case a cut of the Internet connection is announced. It was noted that when these cuts are announced in advance they are normally indicated on the technical schedule and the person on duty is actually reminded of this by email. The main thing to remember is to also inform the observer(s) of this. It was also noted that it is a task of the ORM administration to post such announcements in the Residencia. If this actually occurs will be checked with the ORM administration.

In a separate email a complaint was received from an observer about inappropriate use of ToOs requests for mildly time-critical observations. This was not really the case, but the staff did not provide the observer with the proper information which let the observer believe there was a real issue. The details were clarified to the observer and the staff was reminded to contact the AiC or the director if they have any doubts about any ToO request.

Thomas Augusteijn 2010-02-09