THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
2000

3.6. Other Developments

3.6.1. Photometric Standards

A paper by Hawarden et al. on the UKIRT Faint JHK Standards was accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in October 2000. This was the culmination of many years of hard work; the results are used at many observatories and cited often. Work continues to establish JHK standards on the system of the Mauna Kea Consortium filters, extend the L set to fainter magnitudes, and improve the accuracy of the M set.

3.6.2. Service Observing

Service observing continued to be supported by the UKIRT TAG, at the level of approximately nine nights per semester through 2000. The Service programme is symbiotic with reactive scheduling: service observing can be done in reactive time not taken up due to ``starred'' programmes being completed in their initial allocation.

3.6.3. Flexible Scheduling

Semester 00A saw no flexible scheduled experiments, but we returned to this in 00B, using the experience gained in 1999. Crawford et al.'s Chandra followup was flexed against Levine et al.'s binary star project which required 03 seeing. In the event this was not a good test as Crawford's programme was completed in the first two nights which had 06 seeing, and in the remaining two nights Levine's requirement was never met (although the team took away data sufficient to address many of their science goals). Rawlings et al.'s 3 micron spectroscopy of reddened stars, requiring dry conditions, was flexed against Clark et al.'s mapping of HII regions. The criterion used was the CSO value, the significant value of which was determined in advance to be 0.09 from archive data. Unfortunately all seven half-nights were affected by bad weather. Davis et al. flexed their Fabry-Perot imaging of molecular ``microjets'' against Edge's imaging of molecular hydrogen in cooling flows. This was partly successful with both groups obtaining data, although the extreme resolution required for the microjets was never achieved. In January 2001 local staff flexed two other joint runs. Leggett flexed thermal photometry of L and T dwarfs for dry conditions against standards and wavefront sensing; this worked well and resulted in the first accurate M-band photometry of such objects. Kerr flexed his programme of thermal-infrared spectroscopy of the Red Rectangle against the Chandra followup of Crawford et al. This was succesful due to dry conditions on the first three of the six nights, although again it did not test our ability to flex on the basis of changing conditions.

Finally as a technical highlight which demonstrates why UKIRT is placing increasing emphasis on this type of scheduling, Figure 6 shows the spectrum of the MUSES-C target asteroid SF36, observed with CGS4 in a night of extremely low water vapour ( 0.04). The striking aspect of this spectrum is that it covers the entire near-infrared region, from J through to K, essentially without a break. Cancellation is excellent even in the usually opaque region between the H and K windows (data courtesy of S. Green).