DUTCH OPEN TELESCOPE Report for NOVA ISC meeting nr. 18 Sep 13 2005 R.J. Rutten and F.C.M. Bettonvil Overview -------- - DOT heavily scheduled; successful ITP Solar-B precursor campaign - DOT Speckle Processor operational - DOT focus controller replaced - improved image acquisition software installed - Ba II filter installed - Prof. C.U. Keller, postdoc J. Koza, AIO F. Snik started per July 1 - "Students to the DOT" continues - STW grant for canopy research - EC MC-EST grant for USO graduate school - formal agreement with the IAC nearly final Project management ------------------ The DOT efforts are part of the Sterrekundig Instituut Utrecht (SIU) directed by N. Langer as program leader Astronomy. The SIU is part of the Department of Physics and Astronomy (DepNS) of Utrecht University (UU), formerly the Faculteit Natuur- en Sterrenkunde, now part of the collective UU Faculteit Betawetenschappen. The DOT efforts are funded until 2008 through a guarantee of the Faculteit/Departement Natuur- en Sterrenkunde which includes support from NOVA. This funding covers the salaries of Bettonvil and Suetterlin, 110 kEuro/year for DOT exploitation including travel, 225 kEuro/year of IGF (DepNS workshop) effort, and 12 kEuro/year for on-site student training. Some extra income comes from OPTICON and NASA for international DOT observing. The DOT core team consists of R.J. Rutten (DOT scientist), R.H. Hammerschlag (DOT builder), F.C.M. Bettonvil (DOT project manager), and P. Suetterlin (DOT observing and image processing). AIO's A.G. de Wijn and J. Leenaarts have partial DOT interest. Christoph U. Keller joined the SIU as full professor in experimental astronomy per July 1, with NOVA overlap funding. He combines interest in solar physics (including DOT) with interest in nighttime polarimetry. C.U. Keller presently chairs a committee to fill R.J. Rutten's NOVA overlap position with a solar physicist. EC-funded (FP5 RTN ESMN) postdoc K. Tziotziou left in August for Athens after two years in the DOT team. He will remain involved in DOT data taking and analysis. He is also presently involved in an EC FP6 RTN bid for a third incarnation of the ESMN (European Solar Magnetism Network), including coordinatorship migration from Utrecht to Athens. EC-funded (NOVA MC training site) PhD student P. Gomory returns this week to Slovakia after ten months in our team. EC-funded (FP6 MC-EIF) postdoc J. Koza started July 1 as postdoc in our team for two years. He also comes from Slovakia. The builders of the Irkutsk filter for Ba II 4554 and H-beta, V. Skomorovsky and G. Domichev, came to Utrecht to help refurbish their filter during three weeks in spring, on INTAS funding. The latter grant was successfully extended to enable another visit by them to La Palma this autumn for further filter maintenance. A new proposal for similar future efforts has been submitted to INTAS by R.J. Rutten. TUE student F. Snik became Ir. on the completion of designs for Ba II 4554 and H-beta polarimetry using the Irkutsk Lyot filter on the DOT. He continues, as of July 1, as AIO with C.U. Keller, with the installation, calibration and initial usage of such polarimetry as his first task. A large subsidy for DOT-spinoff research has been granted by NWO's technology foundation STW to Hammerschlag and Bettonvil. Its aim is to study and perfect the fold-away clamshell canopy technology that was initiated with the successful DOT dome, and has in the meantime been copied into the larger GREGOR dome (Tenerife). The grant will fund two engineers who will collaborate closely with the DOT team, and undoubtedly will help to improve DOT technology including software as well. One excellent candidate has been identified. A large subsidy for PhD training has been granted by the EC in the MC-EST program to the formally established Utrecht-Stockholm-Oslo collaboration in solar physics to starts a joint graduate school. The grant furnishes two 3-year graduate studentships at Utecht, for which the DepNS guarantees a fourth year when necessary to obtain a PhD. In addition, the grant furnishes a large number of 3-6 month graduate traineeships. After much hassle, the IAC and the DepNS have at long last come to terms in an official IAC-UU agreement that formally regulates the presence of the DOT on La Palma under the IAC's umbrella in the absence of a Spain-Netherlands treaty concerning astronomical facilities in the Canary Islands. This agreement is concluded except for CCI ratification, presumably straightforward. The contractual cost to pay is an extra 8 kEuro/year above the regular RdlM user fee as "contribution to the IAC's Post Graduate School". This is a long cry from the IAC's earlier requirement of 1 or even 2 full postdoc FTE's, but explicitly not covered by the DepNS funding. A proposal has been submitted to NWO's Open Competition asking for a postdoc to help in DOT science harvesting and for a programmer to realize efficient DOT data serving and integration in the Virtual Solar Observatory. Progress since ISC 17 --------------------- The DOT Speckle Processor has been installed in the building of the Automatic Transit Circle (formerly Carlsberg Meridian Telescope) and is in nearly full 24 hour/day operation since June. The elaborate cooling system, using a 5000-liter water tank for heat storage until sunset, performs well. The appreciable backlog in speckle processing of older DOT data is now disappearing. The Ba II 4554 Lyot filter from Irkutsk was installed in the DOT top. Problems arose when controllers of a wrong type were delivered; these have now been solved. First light will come soon. Dopplergram capability will follow immediately. The DOT focus monitor and control system (a phase-diverse granulation contrast balancer) has been completely renewed after a major breakdown in June. The new system uses the same type of controller as the multi-wavelength speckle imaging system, so that it is now accessible from the latter's control computer. New image-acqusition software has been delivered by IGF and installed in the DOT speckle system. It solves various old problems and finally boosts the camera frame rate to the nominal 12 fps we were long hoping for. However, there are remaining bugs including lack of stability which seriously jeopardizes long-sequence data gathering. Only IGF can solve these (no source code disclosure). With the Ba II 4554 filter, the DOT data product grows up to 4 GByte of fully reconstructed imagery (multi-wavelength, profile-sampling, Dopplergrams and magnetograms) per hour of observing duration. The DOT Speckle Processor now permits frequent collection of such data, whenever the seeing is fair (speckle reconstruction to the diffraction limit needs a Fried parameter of about 7 cm only) with fast processing tunraround. This makes efficient storage and serving important. Hardware for a DOT data server has been installed in the DepNS computer room and is maintained by the DepNS computer group. This is a 3-GHz 64-bit Xeon dual-CPU computer with a 5.1 Tbyte RAID-5 storage system connected, via a UW320 SCSI interface. Its purpose is to become a easily accessible high-volume DOT data server, and as such to be integrated into the Virtual Solar Observatory. Since we do not have the manpower to achieve this, this task became part of the NWO proposal mentioned above. Major meetings -------------- No OPTICON meeting in this period (it takes place later this week). No DOT attendance at the CCI meeting last spring. ESMN meeting: at Sunspot, New Mexico, during the NSO workshop, re continuation under FP6. USO: regular three-weekly USO seminars held on La Palma in June and July as part of the Students to the DOT program. DOT campaigns ------------- This year's DOT schedule is available at https://robrutten.nl/dot/web-schedule2005.txt and is not detailed here. The autumn is nearly fully booked in international campaigns. A particular successful campaign earlier this year was the Japanese-led Solar-B precursor campaign combining the DOT with the SST and the VTT on Tenerife as well as SOHO and TRACE in space. This was this year's Internatonal Time Program campaign selected by the CCI. It met good seeing on most of its 12 observing days. A beautiful morph-over and multiple-wavelength movie from this campaign are available at https://robrutten.nl/dot/DOT_showpieces.html. A rocket experiment flying a UV imaging spectrometer from White Sands during the Japanese campaign was co-pointed simultaneously with the DOT on the Japanese campaign's sunspot group. We had good seeing and got good data, but the CCD in the rocket spectrometer malfunctioned disastrously. Last week's campaign, for which we had great hopes with respect to gathering Halpha imaging and Dopplergrams for ambitious research into solar spicules, unfortunately met first with bad seeing, than with complete evacuation of the Roque de Los Muchachos observatory due to a large forest fire downslope. It reached up to the Residencia's doorstep but the observatory was spared in a large extinguishing effort. Students to the DOT: two pairs spent two weeks at the DOT. Information (and photographs) at https://robrutten.nl/dot/DOT_student.html. Milestones ---------- Publications: Papers IV and V of our A&A series "DOT tomography of the solar atmosphere" were submitted and accepted. Number VI is nearly done; number VII has been defined. All DOT publications are accessible at https://robrutten.nl/dot/DOT_publications.html. Presentations: - DOT talks by R.J. Rutten and A.G. de Wijn at the 23rd NSO Workshop (Sunspot, USA); - DOT talk by J. Leenaarts at a solar physics conference in Lindau; - DOT talks by F.C.M. Bettonvil and K. Tziotziou and posters by F. Snik and A.G. de Wijn at the Nederlandse Astronomenconferentie. Critical areas -------------- The DOT is run on a very tight budget. The major risk in our DOT observing and the major limitation in our DOT science harvesting remains lack of manpower. DOT observing presently requires the presence and full attention of Hammerschlag, Bettonvil and Suetterlin, but so do hardware and software maintenance and upgrading. Observing and technical improvements, for example software debugging, are thus in strong competition. In paticular, as noted in earier reports, the lack of a knowledgeable systems engineer devoted to the DOT and replacing (part of) the IGF software effort is a strong permanent drawback. On the science side, having some AIOs and additional EC-funded researchers helps, but there is much more science to be gotten out of DOT data, especially now that its production rate shoots up with the DOT Speckle Processor, than we can address ourselves. Data spreading to the whole community is an obvious boon to solar physics as well as to boost DOT usage and visibility, but we yet lack the manpower to create an effective virtual-observatory-compliant data server. The DOT future beyond the beginning of 2008 remains uncertain. Of principal importance is the question to what extent the presently unique DOT data products will be supplied in the future by the Solar-B mission, launch planned medio 2006. Having the same aperture, it should deliver similar data, without the vagaries imposed by seeing and nightly interruptions, but subject to severe (but yet unclear) limitations set by telemetry. The Japanese ITP campaign this summer was a precursor for them to get research experience with this type of multi-diagnostic data. There may well be a sustained need for such DOT observing in the Solar-B era, in particular re Solar-B - DOT concerted co-observing. Obviously, the DOT++ plan for aperture and field tripling would give the DOT renewed uniqueness in the Solar-B era, but this plan remains on hold for lack of funding. Plans for the coming half year ----------------------------- Ba II 4554 filter: first light and first Dopplergrams. Polarimetry tests in October, including temporary installation of a polarization calibration unit in the primary beam. Service and upgrade of the calcite tuning drives in November during an INTAS-funded visit of V. Skomorovsky and G. Domichev. Addition of a camera to register images in a continuum passband close to Ba II 4554, to optimize two-channel speckle reconstruction (October). Debugging of the new image-acquisition software (i.e. feeding failure reports to IGF). Installation and debugging of De Wijn's parallel C-coded version of the DOT speckle code in the DOT Speckle Processor. The aim is to replace the current quasi-parallel IDL software, reaching even larger reconstruction speed-up. Start of software development for web-based DOT database serving and integration into the Virtual Solar Obsrvatory - if manpower permits. Installation of a small full-disk Halpha monitor telescope, desired for DOT pointing to filaments and solar eruptions. Students to the DOT: three pairs of UU students are booked to spend two weeks at the DOT. Schedule at https://robrutten.nl/dot/DOT_student.html. Startup of the STW-funded canopy research program. Startup of the EC-funded USO graduate school. INTAS, ESMN-3 and other EC proposal writing if the pertinent preproposals make it through the first round. The DOT schedule for 2006 will be defined in February, after the January 31 proposal deadline, and in close consultation with the SST scheduler. Above all, our plan is to do as much DOT observing and as much DOT paper writing as we can!