From the Director's Desk

Starting off a Newsletter with talk of yet another six months of poor weather on the summit and yet more changes of staff now seems to becoming standard. However, the good news is that there was one excellent spell of dry weather in August, which lasted almost a week; the best we have seen so far this year. This poor trend of weather prompted me to ask for an analysis of the CSO tau and seeing measures for the past four years to see just how they pattern has affected the ratio of band 1 to 5 weather for allocating and scheduling (see later). Major progress has been made on completing three facility projects, which is important for the development programme and for staff morale.

On the staffing side, recruitment continues to be difficult, and continues to be necessary due to staff changes. Mary Fuka retired in May after ten years of excellent service. Mary was responsible for much of the telescope software that has been so reliable over the years. Two TSSs, Jeff Cox and Rusty Luthe left in July, Jeff for Gemini South, and Rusty to the CFHT. Both had held long and distinguished careers as will be testified by visiting observers. Ian Pain, the JAC senior mechanical engineer, returned to the UK after five years at the JAC, he is now at the UKATC in Edinburgh. On the recruitment front we have recruited Ian's replacement (Tomas Chylek), a senior instrument technician for the JCMT (Ken Brown) a Junior Software Engineer for the JAC (Mathew Rippa taking over some of Mary's responsibilities) and two new Telescope Support Specialists (Jim Hoge and Jonathan Kemp). Teresa Dorward (PPARC finance assistant) will be leaving us for the La Palma site and her replacement, Chelo Gomez arrives in September (from La Palma!).

Two further and major impacts on staffing regarded Wayne Holland and Graeme Watt. Wayne was appointed as the project scientist for the exciting new SCUBA-2 instrument, which is great for SCUBA-2 but leaves a huge hole at the JCMT in terms of knowledge of SCUBA. Wayne is truly 'Mr SCUBA' and he will be sorely missed. This new position takes effect from September 1st, although he will remain on-site until early in 2001. Graeme Watt will be leaving the JCMT to return to PPARC (Swindon) as Technology Co-ordinator, a new and very important and growing role within PPARC. Graeme will effectively transfer over in late September and will leave Hawaii in early 2001. Graeme was one of the original day-one support astronomers for the JCMT and in his role of scheduler, through extensive and time-consuming efforts, he has managed to satisfy most users with regard to satisfying the often conflicting requirements of scheduling. He also takes away a huge amount of knowledge built up over the years.

These latter two departures have caused a rethink to the management of the JCMT and individual roles and responsibilities. Let me first take the post of Telescope Manager, the responsibilities of which had been redefined after Wayne took over this post last year. For a number of reasons, including the success of the Chief Engineer in clearly defining the areas of responsibility for upkeep and maintenance, the general improvement in the facility reliability (see later for the instruments) and the simplification of the Development Projects, opportunity was taken for a major management reorganisation. The development projects are now much smaller in number, albeit larger in individual size. Also, all of the external instruments now have a dedicated project manager who is directly responsible for the production of the instrument, and so the requirements for the Head of Instrument Development have changed. The reorganisation has removed the latter post and Per Friberg's duties have been redefined to include those of the Telescope Manager. This was agreed by the JCMT Board after internal discussion. From September 1st Per becomes Associate Director of the JCMT with responsibilities previously undertaken by the Telescope Manager along with responsibilities for some of the individual new instruments. Aspects of his previous workload will be taken up by myself (overall financial management of the Development Fund, SCUBA-2 overseeing), the Finance Office (day-to-day financial management and allocations/outturns etc), and other support astronomers. This represents quite a change and unfortunately leaves Per with a very sizeable line-management task. I'm sure everyone will rally round to support Per in his new work. I will also revert back to taking the scientific overview and quality issue of the JCMT as opposed to the Telescope Manager. For telescope scheduling and the post of ITAC secretary, Gerald Moriarty-Schieven has bravely stepped in and taken over from Graeme. Plans for other changes of duties are still being worked through, although it is clear that support will be very tight over the coming months as there are more duties to allocate than bodies to take them on. Patience from users will be appreciated.

Another new aspect that arose since the last Newsletter is the use of volunteer support astronomers to act as TSSs. This was approved by the Board in May as a trial venture that would enable sixteen hour observing shifts to be maximised during a period of lack of TSSs. This has turned out to be much more complex than was originally anticipated due to the need for more extensive training on safety issues. Everyone should be well aware that safety of personnel is my prime responsibility and in response to a potentially serious accident at the summit, a programme of intensive training leading to formal TSS certification for both telescopes has been put in place.

Moving onto the telescope facility, overall this has been very reliable apart from the occasional glitches that affected one or two users. I am very pleased to be able to report that the new Telescope Control System has been commissioned and is working well. This project turned out to be far more complex than expected and great credit goes to Nick Rees and Firmin Oliveira for its successful completion. The work on the surface project to install the new panel adjuster electronics has just been very successful (see the JCMT web-page) and so work now turns to understanding how to use these with new software to make an active surface that is best matched to conditions at all times. Replacing the old adjustment system had the potential to scramble the dish if the team had not planned the work meticulously. The new holography system will now be fully commissioned in the next month or so.

Turning to the instruments, I am very pleased to note that RxA3 is now back in service, thanks to high dedication by the JCMT staff. RxB3 is now more reliable and SCUBA has done well after a scare in the summer when excess noise appeared and subsequently disappeared. On the other hand, SCUBA has just suffered an unexpected warm-up due to problems with the liquid nitrogen cold-trap. I remain concerned about the lack of applications to use RxW, which continues to pose questions regarding the requirement for a high frequency array receiver. The C-band in RxW has always been very competitive and after the replacement of the D-band mixers, this frequency is also highly competitive. However, the applications to undertake high frequency astronomy with RxW continues to languish, being only 7% of total applications for semester 00B, the same as for the SCUBA polarimeter. In this light, SCUBA continues to dominate with 58% of the application for time. I would be grateful to hear from potential high frequency users as to what they perceive as any problems or why they believe there are such a low number of applications and what we might do about it. After discussions at the ITAC it was agreed that we will undertake a trial for semester 01A with RxW being offered in blocks of time. This has advantages for us in that we can support it much better in concentrated blocks and the TSSs can remain current in its tuning characteristics. I am hoping that RxW applications will increase this time round otherwise I'm sure the Board will be enquiring about the strategic future of high frequency heterodyne astronomy at the JCMT. SPIFI was totally weathered out in spite of a flexibly scheduled run of over three weeks, and the Max Planck 800 GHz receiver fared little better, although it was proven that it was working well and is very competitive in terms of its sensitivity. Both are expected to be available for use in semester 01A.

I am delighted to note the exciting science contributions to the Newsletter. On a personal note I found the lunar scan-map to be absolutely excellent, although for some reason the reproduction on the web-page does not appear as spectacular as I have seen. It is a little known fact that the first observing I did on Mauna Kea was in 1973 on the UH 88-inch, trying to map M82 at 400 microns. With one thing and another the only thing we got out of the run was a rather rudimentary map of the Moon, which was duly written up and published to ensure funding for another expedition. The comparison between that and what SCUBA has just achieved is rather like Galileo's depiction of the rings of Saturn compared to the HST view! A major project has just been completed and submitted for publication: the two-colour continuum mapping of the Galactic Centre region. This produced some spectacular data that will feature strongly in the next Newsletter. SCUBA continues to dominate the conference scene on galaxies in the early Universe, as was shown at the Amherst meeting and the IAU at Manchester. The recent press releases concerning the discovery of planets around nearby stars, especially Epsilon Eridani, brought about more attention to the SCUBA images of these systems.

I hope that users will have logged on and noticed the new JCMT web-pages. These have proved to be very popular and changes will continue as we refine the system to make the information more readily accessible for users and the general public. It is our intention that all our information will be web-based and so ready access and retrieval is an important matter in overall web-design. Thanks go to Robin Phillips for this work. Suggestions for improvements/additions are always welcome - please send to Robin. The Newsletter will continue to be web-based, unless there is significant pressure to add a paper version (which costs more money and effort of course).

The November Board meeting is going to be very important with regard to the future development and operation of the JCMT. SCUBA-2 remains the highest priority instrument but is expensive and the problem remains as to how to fund it and the high frequency heterodyne array, CHAMP-D, over and above the current level of the Development Fund. The Board asked me to produce a series of potential operational models whereby funds from operations are used to increase those available for new instrumentation. This will be the focus of an email exploder that will be issued in the next few weeks regarding users' inputs to the debate. This is clearly a very important potential milestone and users are invited to make their input through the JCMT Advisory Panel. At the moment the SCUBA-2 proof-of-concept phase is being funded by PPARC alone.

Finally, let me close by extending my sincere thanks to two long-standing members who retired from the JCMT Board at the last meeting, Don Morton and Ewine van Dishoeck. I would also like to extend congratulations to Ewine on behalf of all JCMT users for her recent award of the highly prestigious Spinoza Prize (the highest scientific award in the Netherlands) in recognition of her world-leading research on the chemistry of the interstellar medium, much of which was undertaken using the JCMT.