The first day's meeting ended with an executive session. The second day began with a discussion of KPNO TAC policy and continued with status reports from Doug Tody on IRAF, Steve Grandi on Central Computer Services, and Matt Johns and Caty Pilachowski on the WIYN telescope. At the request of the Committee, Sidney Wolff returned for a discussion of how Gemini might impact KPNO, a topic which was continued in a follow-on discussion with Dave De Young. Rather than present a detailed summary of the material presented to the Users' Committee in the series of presentations we heard, the remainder of this report will focus on the concerns and recommendations expressed to the Kitt Peak Director by the Committee. This departs somewhat from the tradition of these reports, but we note that all of the topics presented to us are frequently and excellently reported to the user community on the pages of this Newsletter.
Image quality is basic to the optimization of instrument performance.
The Committee applauds and strongly endorses the efforts of the mountain staff to implement a program of routine monitoring of collimation and the elimination of dome seeing sources in order to take advantage of the intrinsic seeing quality on Kitt Peak. Such a program is long overdue. The operation of the Kitt Peak facilities has been quantitatively and qualitatively improved under the leadership of Bruce Bohannan as Mountain Manager. The Committee applauds the enthusiastic and energetic manner in which Bruce has approached virtually every aspect of his job, and we note a substantial improvement in the morale of mountain employees. The mountain technical staff certainly cannot stand any further reductions when the staffing situation is already at this critically thin level.