We have now observed one month out of four in the 2017-3 period. The month started off pretty slow with lots of bad weather in August but we have had some good clear nights. We are still conducting 7 days of engineering around full moon, at least until we get our first bright time instrument. So far we have collected 52.9 hours of charged time and completed 21.8% of the TAC allocated time. We have started collecting the first LRS2 Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) allocated by the HET board for the instrument team as well as the first time allocated by the HET board for the HETDEX experiment. The latter includes time on well studied fields to make sure that our Lyman alpha emitters detected not really other types of emission sources and to better quantify our sensitivity/throughput.

We have completed the 2017-2 trimester (April – July). It was a very successful. The HET Board allowed us to transition from 2 weeks of science operations per lunation to 3 weeks of science operations. We also completed a large commissioning effort of 27 hours of VIRUS exposures on well studied EGS fields. Below are some statistics from the trimester: 138.5 hours of acceptable high priority exposures and 40.5 hours of low priority filler exposures. The average overhead for LRS2 per requested visit was 7.9 minutes which is nearly a factor of two better than the overheads with LRS before the Wide Field Upgrade. The average visit length was 18 minutes long and the longest completed visit was 120 minutes. The completion rate for priority 0 targets was 97.2%, for priority 1 targets was 98.1%, for priority 2 targets was 90.1% and for priority 3 targets was 96.4%.

For the new 2017-3 trimester (August – November) we will continue with the 3 weeks of science per lunation. The HET board has approved the first HETDEX time as well as Guaranteed Time Observing (GTO) for the commissioning team of LRS2. In addition, we are expecting to see the arrival of the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) spectrograph.

This week marked the end of another dark run and thus the end of another science period. We are now also three quarters of the way through the current science period labeled 17-1. As such we are starting to see a larger number of filler Priority 4 targets being observed. In this last dark run we observed 374 acceptable observations for a total of 38 hours and 122 Priority 4 targets for a total of 22 hours. We saw 6% of the time lost due to problems. This is a fairly respectable number and fairly typical of the mature HET before the takedown.

We are now three quarters of the way through the current 17-1 period. The Telescope Allocation Committees have begun meeting and the new allocations are being submitted for the 17-2 period which begins April 1. For this period the same suite of instruments will be available for the PIs: LRS2-B and LRS2-R and the two weeks around dark time will also be fully committed to science observing.

The end of this week marks us as half way through the current 4 month period (December – March). We have completed 70% of the highest priority band P1, 52% of the P2 band and 41% of the P3 band time. The bad weather we had at the beginning of the period, back in December, really kept us from completing many of the high priority targets in the Sheila field which is now unreachable until the late summer.

There are 10 programs that have been completed out of 27 programs. Some of our users have never been granted HET time before so there is a bit of a learning curve in how to optimize the HET time. Hopefully our Synoptic Supernova teams can make excellent use of the remaining 2 months of the period.

For the next 2 weeks (during the bright time) we will be concentrating on making further improvements to our telescope control systems, wavefront sensor systems and instrument control systems. It is going to be a very busy 2 weeks!

We have finished another dark period from the first trimester back observing with the HET. Recall that we are only observing during the two weeks around the new moon. Thus, we finished up last week with our targets that can be observed with some moon. We have completed 63.4 hours of charged time with typical setup times of 10 minutes for LRS2 targets. Some programs, particularly those from our smaller partners, have been completed finished while a few of the larger programs have only had a small dent made in their total Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) allocations.

There are a few fields that seem to be very popular. The Shelia and Cosmos fields are among the most heavily over-subscribed. We will not be able to complete the requested visits to the Shelia fields but if the weather permits and the engineering efforts during the 1st quarter are not to heavy we might try to sneak in a few more targets.

We are developing a hole at the start of the night after the Shelia field sets and will likely have to deal with that in the next few weeks unless some new targets arrive.