OVERVIEW

HIA operates the 1.2-m Cassegrain/Coudé telescope (1962) and 1.8-m Modified Newtonian/Cassegrain Plaskett Telescope (1918) in Victoria; the former is currently used entirely for high-dispersion spectroscopy of point sources, while the latter is used for direct imaging and spectroscopy. Section I documents their current status, while Section II indicates their continuing high potential and proposes how to achieve it.

The 1.2-m and 1.8-m telescopes are better equipped and more versatile than at any time in their history. They are contributing effectively to scientific research, student training and public outreach. Their modes of operation have been modified in the last three years to achieve greater economies and efficiencies. We are "open for business" and innovative ideas that will maximize the scientific impact of the facilities as our science evolves, and we are confident that they can play important roles for Canadian astronomy to 2015 and beyond.

As a result of staff evolution, the telescopes now lack a staff scientific champion and adequate engineering support. We propose the addition of one continuing staff astronomer whose early career with HIA would be largely tied to improving the instrumentation for the Victoria telescopes, while performing excellent scientific research with them in collaboration with members of the university community. We also propose a further budgetary augmentation that would allow two engineering co-op students per year to be assigned to the Instrumentation Group to perform work on the DAO Telescopes. The total incremental cost would be about $100K/yr.

1. The DAO Telescopes Today

Full information about performance characteristics and usage is available at http://www.hia.nrc.ca/facilities/dao/ and in the annual reports under DGO on the HIA web pages.

Their levels of use by Canadian university scientists and students (as well as international ones) and their scientific productivity are good. Their style of operation under computer control with excellent CCD and IR detectors enables students to become proficient by assuming full responsibility for their observing following introductory training. The telescopes are operated extremely cost effectively, and have benefited from immediate proximity to the strong technical staff in Victoria who work on projects for Canada's off-shore facilities. Thus, it has generally proven possible in the past to implement upgrades during lulls in that work. Moreover, our engineers and technicians enjoy working on the telescopes and using them as testbeds for new ideas.

A. Scientific Capabilities and Performance

In 1991-1996, an average of 1468 and 1326 hrs were logged by users of the 1.2-m and 1.8-m telescopes, respectively. Typically, observations are secured on some 210 nights/year and seeing conditions are 2-3" in the visible, with better image quality reported in the near IR. The telescopes are scheduled quarterly following advice from the TAC; they are typically oversubscribed by 10-20%.

The average usage over fiscal years 1993/95 through 1997/98 was 39 scientists from 12 Canadian universities coast-to-coast, plus scientists from 17 (total) countries. Many of the programmes are major, long-term studies. Several theses and co-ordinated international campaigns (including with HST) are supported in a typical year. About 40 papers by visiting scientists are published per year that contain data from the DAO telescopes. Some recent scientific highlights by Canadian users include:

• A long-term project aims to provide high-quality astrophysical gf values for the interpretation of stellar spectra.
• The Plaskett Telescope is the largest telescope that is routinely used for international campaigns to determine orbits for near-Earth objects (including those that might collide with Earth): >1600 astrometric positions were published from it in FY97/98.
• The Plaskett Telescope provides long-term monitoring of selected AGN to look at gas flows in the broad-lined region in co-ordination with telescopes elsewhere.
• A recent Ph.D. thesis determined properties of an open cluster critical to evaluating the accuracy of theoretical models for stellar evolution.
• An international team discovered that Beta Lyrae has bi-polar jets centered on the point of apparent impact of the gas stream between the components onto the dense part of the accretion disk around the more massive component.
• Multisite campaigns between Ondrejov and Victoria discovered nonradial oscillations in early-type binary star systems, whose few-day time scales could not be discerned from a single site.

B. Operations and Recent Developments

In the summer of 1998 we commissioned an IR camera (built by Université de Montréal) for imaging, and it is being tested this November for spectroscopy. We have acquired SDSU CCD controllers that will improve CCD readout noise levels a factor of two once implemented, and we have acquired a 2 X 4 K CCD that will be very effective for coudé spectroscopy. Staff and community users have a wealth of ideas (Section II, below) for enhancements to the scientific capabilities of the telescopes that would enable even more efficient operations.

The telescopes now operate with a single dedicated technical officer who performs setups, routine maintenance and minor upgrades. Approximately 0.2-0.3 FTE goes into scheduling, misc. technical assistance, planning, etc.

Since the major 1995 NRC budget reductions, our goal - not yet fully achieved - has been to reach a state where we have a detector fixed to each instrument so that we will not have to move them between domes or foci. To date we have greatly reduced the number of instrument and configuration changes. Eliminating changeovers improves operational efficiency and minimizes downtime. Apart from the salary of the technical officer, we annually spend <$20K operations funds for cryogenics, smaller replacements, etc. and approximately $30K capital funds for upgrading detectors, controllers, etc.

We have also been conducting a dialogue with the Canadian community through CASCA meetings and e-mail in which we have sought ideas for improvements to our operations. We have particularly encouraged individuals to propose major programmes even if their adoption meant some significant change in our traditional mode of operating. We are "open for business" and innovative ideas that will maximize the scientific impact of the facilities.

Since late 1997 three highly experienced observers resident in Victoria have been performing service observing under contract directly to scientists with approved programmes. About 100 and 50 nights on the 1.2-m and 1.8-m telescopes, respectively, were used this way in 1998. Guest investigators only pay for hours in which data were obtained. This new mode of operating is helping to offset the hidden costs of travelling to Victoria for university faculty (lost teaching time and dealing with vagaries of weather).

C. Public Outreach

The Plaskett Telescope is the centrepiece of HIA's public outreach efforts in Victoria, and indeed is probably the single largest consistent draw for the taxpayers into any NRC facility. It is open to the public every Saturday evening April-October for viewing and explanatory presentations, every day (unattended) during working hours, and hosts about 125 school and group tours per year. We estimate that some 40,000 people a year visit the Observatory (including many "drop ins" whose curiosity is piqued when spotting the big dome from the highway as they go to Butchart Gardens); with advertising it would be straightforward to increase this number greatly.

With strong encouragement from 1998 review committees, NRC is considering strengthening its outreach efforts in Victoria. We may be able to create a much needed visitors centre, which will only increase public demand to see "the big telescope" in action.

II. The DAO Telescopes In The Future

With the infrastructure already in place and with sufficient interest expressed during this LRPP process from the community, the Victoria telescopes can easily continue to play important roles in the national fabric of Canadian astronomy until 2015 or beyond.

A. New Operational Modes and Instrumentation

There is no end to the list of really interesting ideas whose implementation could offer exciting new research opportunities for the community, including:

• Convert the Plaskett Telescope into an APT (automatic photometric telescope) operated remotely, with the data going into a modified Gemini Data Handling System through a calibration (and recalibration) pipeline into an archive. There are ideas for how this mode might also serve public outreach and the visitors centre.
• Dedicate large fractions of the observing time for timely programmes whose scientific justification can raise external money for general operations and/or necessary instrumentation.
• Implement IR spectroscopy at both telescopes; this is being tested at the 1.2-m with the new 256 X 256 pixel VERONICA detector system, but larger IR arrays are already available and even bigger ones are coming. This would enable planetary searches, as well as studies of stellar activity cycles, magnetic fields, chromospheres, circumstellar gas, etc.
• Bring the Herzberg Spectrograph back from CFHT, place it on the floor of the 1.8-m Plaskett Telescope (for enhanced velocity stability) and feed it with a fibre in such a way that enables a rapid switchover between imaging and spectroscopic modes.
• Construct a fibre feed plus echelle spectrograph for the 1.2-m telescope, which would eliminate maintenance of its coudé mirror train and all instrument setups. This would permit competitive precision radial velocity studies, multisite continuous spectroscopy (MUSICOS) campaigns, spectropolarimetry, etc.
• Implement tip-tilt active optics for image improvement at both telescopes; preliminary design studies indicate this would be easy to do for the 1.2-m. Generally, conduct dome seeing studies to pinpoint where maximum gains can be made in image quality (there is evidence that the 1.2-m dome degrades images relative to the 1.8-m dome).
• In conjunction with universities, offer formal graduate student workshops and training in IR and optical spectroscopy and photometry. 

B. Light Pollution and Demographics

Community members and the LRRP may be interested in how these topics might affect the productivity of the Victoria telescopes in the next 10-15 years.

Population growth has been strong in Victoria in the past decade. Local municipal councils have reacted very sympathetically to HIA's entreaties. As a result, we review all proposals for commercial lighting within a 5 km radius of DAO, which remains a predominantly rural area, and we can reject those that do not conform to the lighting code adopted to protect the Observatory. Co-operation from councils and developers has been excellent and, as material on the HIA web pages proves, the telescopes achieve amazing limiting magnitudes for spectroscopy and photometry. However, with staff losses in recent years, our ability to maintain public awareness of the deleterious impact of outdoor lighting is virtually zero at present. With modest efforts by the new staff astronomer proposed below, it seems likely that spectroscopic and photometric programmes can continue to prosper for at least the horizon of this LRPP effort.

Many current users of the Victoria telescopes will retire by 2005. While demand from them may initially go up as a result of their release from teaching and other university duties, inevitably their usage will decline during the latter part of the next decade. Current hiring trends in Canadian institutions are focussing on theory and observational cosmology, rather than stellar astronomy for which the Victoria telescopes are more suited. It is problematic at the moment whether there will be as large a user community by 2010 as there is now. However, I am confident that there will be some excellent stellar astronomers in the future of Canadian astronomy, who will be at least as clever as their predecessors. A few very good people allocated large quantities of time for key scientific questions on well instrumented national facilities operated efficiently can have very great scientific impact, and thus justify modest investments such as those currently being made and proposed below. 

C. Proposal

With the steady reduction since 1984 of the NRC and HIA budgets combined with increasing expenses of our offshore facilities, HIA repeatedly faces the question of closure of facilities, including the Victoria telescopes. Because of their diverse, meritorious roles, and scientific productivity described above, HIA has made great effort and considerable sacrifices to lower operating costs for the Victoria telescopes in order to maintain their availability to the community.

There are no further significant economies that HIA can make. Some already feel that we are now operating the telescopes with staffing and budget levels that will lead to users drifting away in response to higher failure rates or outdated equipment because HIA no longer has the capacity or will to maintain the Victoria telescopes adequately. 

There are two imminent challenges:

1. The HIA Advisory Board shares my concern that there is no champion for the telescopes on the continuing staff. Indeed, at present, usage by Optical Astronomy staff is low, in part because large staff reductions combined with heavy workloads leave little time for research at HIA.
2. The large work load and the higher priority given to outside contracts for major developments for other telescopes (primarily Gemini, CFHT, NGST) mean that it is virtually impossible for HIA engineers to implement improvements for the DAO telescopes now or during the foreseeable future (2-3 years).

With other Gemini-sized projects proposed as part of this Long Range Planning exercise, it becomes problematic whether or not the Victoria telescopes will have the access to engineering support in the Gemini operations era that they once had during lulls between earlier CFHT  projects. Notwithstanding, I believe that if the Telescope Group had the following additional resources we could, in partnership with the community and the Instrumentation Group, achieve a steady renewal of the facilities and ensure their continued contribution to scientific research until 2015 or beyond.

I propose two staffing actions:

1. Hire an astronomer whose career advancement within NRC for approximately the next 10 years is tied primarily to leading the development and implementation of advanced spectroscopic and imaging instrumentation for these telescopes and performing excellent research with them in conjunction with members of the community. I particularly envision that this individual will lead the development with university researchers of a scientific initiative aimed at solving some major astrophysical problem. Such experience will be invaluable for the appointeeís eventual participation in, and leadership of, projects for offshore facilities like Gemini and CFHT, as well.

Cost: $60K/yr initially

2. Dedicate two 3rd-4th year engineering co-op positions to the telescopes over the next three years (until the wave of Gemini instruments crests) to work under the guidance of experienced HIA engineers to implement new detectors, controllers, etc. or to design mechanical components of instrumentation. These represent excellent training opportunities for the next generation of Canadian engineers and instrumentalists.

Cost: $18K/yr (total for two terms of four months each)

Implementation of upgrades would also require access to operations and minor capital funds on a project-by-project basis in competition with other HIA projects.

The total cost including travel, publications, and some computer support would be about $100K/yr.