AT Users Committee meeting report

The most recent meeting of the Australia Telescope Users Committee (ATUC) was held on 9 – 10 December 2004, at the ATNF headquarters in Marsfield. This was the last meeting for several ATUC members, Naomi McClure-Griffiths, Maria Hunt (regular members) and Bradley Warren (student member). On behalf of the ATNF user community I'd like to thank Naomi, Maria and Bradley for their efforts and input into ATUC during their terms. Also in December, ATNF overseas users were formally represented at ATUC for the first time by Adam Burgasser from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From now on at each ATUC meeting, overseas users will be represented by an observer visiting from overseas.

ATUC were particularly impressed with a number of ATNF projects that have achieved notable milestones or levels of success, in particular: the deployment of the full 3-mm system on the Compact Array and the prospects for its first full-winter season; the success of the e-VLBI project in its progress toward a real-time, high bandwidth VLBI network; and the Australia Telescope Online Archive, which looks fantastic and likely to greatly boost the scientific output of the ATNF.

The full report from the December ATUC meeting is currently available on the ATUC website (www.atnf.csiro.au/management/atuc ), along with an archive of supporting documents that were used at the ATUC meeting. The meeting report should be referred to for full details of all the agenda items. Some of the more substantive issues that were covered at the meeting were as follows:

• Scheduling issues

Some users are concerned with the time delay between proposal submission and notification of the outcome of the TAC meeting. Usually notification to users of the outcome of their submitted proposals occurs only when the observing schedules are released or when they receive the hardcopy notification in the post. ATUC suggested that sending TAC comments and rankings in letters to proposal contact people via the regular post could be replaced by email notification. In the future, once the electronic proposal system has been developed, it would be useful if notification emails could be sent to a nominated list of the proposal co-investigators, rather than just a single contact person.

• Competency of Compact Array duty astronomers

ATUC requested that more attention be paid to the quality and effectiveness of the Duty Astronomer service provided at Narrabri. Duty astronomers (DAs) are astronomers rostered from ATNF staff, students and the user community to provide support to observers at Narrabri for periods of one week at a time. In particular, ATUC suggested that astronomers who are undertaking DA duties for the first time should arrive earlier at Narrabri (on the Monday rather than the Wednesday) so that they can overlap with the previous DA, become familiar with their duties, and learn about any recent changes to the system or current problems, ahead of when their duty is scheduled to start. ATUC also suggested that once per year there could be an induction day(s)/weekend for new DAs or DAs who have not observed in Narrabri for a significant period of time.

• Mopra 3-mm 8-GHz system

ATUC were asked to look at several options for the operation of the 3-mm system at Mopra in the 2005 and 2006 winter seasons and to give some feedback on which option would be preferable. Please refer to the full report on the web for the ATUC discussion on the various options that were considered.

In the near future, ATUC and the ATNF will aim to organise meetings for users to discuss the likely capabilities and scientific goals of a potential Compact Array 7-mm system and the capabilities and scientific goals of the NTD and xNTD projects. These meetings will likely take place in early to mid-2005. Announcements for the meetings may be made in the coming weeks.

Finally, if users have any comments on the content of the latest ATUC report, they can contact the ATUC Chair (stingay@astro.swin.edu.au). For more general comments and suggestions to ATUC, users should feel free to contact their local ATUC member (listed on the ATUC webpage) or submit comments online via the ATUC webpage.

Steven Tingay
ATUC Chair
(stingay@astro.swin.edu.au)