GeminiFocus May 2014 | Page 20

and don’t be shy with your contributions! At the time of writing, the form hosts about 20 individual topic threads with a few dozen postings and replies or followups. It also has half a dozen scripts and packages, links to reduction cookbooks (some by Gemini staff, some by users), and some general threads directed at answering specific queries. The Users’ Committee for Gemini will be looking at all the postings and selecting the winners of the Discretionary Time competition. GeMS Laser News Figure 2. A screen-capture showing the Data Reduction Forum homepage. best two contributions received in the first few months! The forum has a simple interface (Figure 2), using tags to keep track of topics by type, and is intended to provide a user-supported, and more open, complement to the Helpdesk — which will remain operated as always, by the National Gemini Offices and Gemini staff. The forum is young, but already there have been quite a few postings by users, and some useful scripts (e.g. for Integral Field Unit data analysis, Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph, cross-dispersed spectroscopy, general imaging reduction, etc.) by both users and Gemini staff alike. If you’re a graduate student involved in Gemini data, or a seasoned veteran with your own package to contribute, take a look at this forum 18 GeminiFocus As users of the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS) are probably aware, the March run of the instrument had to be cancelled on short notice. The reason: a major loss of power from the laser, which nominally projects 50 Watts of sodium yellow light into the sodium layer of Earth’s atmosphere and produces the five guide stars for GeMS. A laser specialist engineer from Lockheed Martin came to the Cerro Pachón site and worked with our staff to restore the laser power. At the time of writing, the laser is running at 30W, just going into the April GeMS run; this is not as good as hoped for and further work is being planned. Operations Working Group Meets in Hilo In February, the Operations Working Group held its 26th meeting in Hilo, just before issuing the 2014B call for proposals. From this meeting emerged a number of resolutions and actions, including an agreement that, for users requiring good seeing, we relax the full-width at half-maximum values cor- April 2014