Message from the Director

Following the Optical-Infrared-Millimetre review by PPARC, a decision has been taken to give the island sites more autonomy. The process of defining what this autonomy means and the implementation of the new regime are currently under discussion.

Recruitment and staffing planning has taken a major effort over the past few months and a number of interviews regarding new posts are in the pipeline or have taken place. JCMT operations suffered an upward blip in the time lost through faults, mainly because of tuning problems with RxA2 and some problems with micros, especially the carousel. Work on projects has made good progress and the power and grounding is now essentially completed. Much effort is currently being expended on preparations for the new receivers.

Users may not be aware of the fact that each week at the Operations Meetings which is attended by myself, the Telescope Manager, Scheduler, the support astronomers, telescope operators, members of the software group, Chief Engineer and Head of the Instrument Support Group, the work done on the telescope over the past week, the faults, reports from users are all discussed in detail. The user reports are very helpful in illuminating those areas where we are not quite up to user expectations (and these virtually always come as no surprise as they are areas we are either working on, or are effort limited in making further progress) and for providing a quick summary of the scientific results and potential for publications. Although users naturally tend to focus on the faults (because that is the way the questions are asked) it is very gratifying to read the very positive points made by many concerning the quality of the facility and support offered by the JCMT. Suggestions for improvements to the software are usually appended to the list and these are often incorporated to the 'software wish list'.

We continue to move towards greater reliance on the WWW for our information systems and documentation. As Graeme Watt will describe later, this Newsletter will appear on the WWW long before the hardcopy version arrives on users' desks. We expect to make even greater use of the WWW for information and documentation but I am aware of the problems of users having to login continually to catch new items. We will be addressing the ways by which users can be 'prompted' to read the relevant items over the next few months. The use of e-mail exploders is probably the easiest process that further information will be disseminated.

The workshop on New Modes of Observing for the Next Century was held in Hilo from July 6th to 8th and was extremely successful. There were about 80 attendees at the meeting (the conference photo is on the WWW on the JCMT home page) and stimulating discussion sessions were plentiful. It is very clear that all major international (and many national) facilities are rapidly moving towards some form of flexible scheduling, to match the requirements of the observational programme with the weather pertaining at the telescope. Queue scheduling and tools to implement queuing were very impressive, as were some of the user-interface input screens. Later in this Newsletter I discuss how we anticipate moving towards flexible scheduling, linked with commissioning RxW and SCUBA. A highlight of the last semester was the successful introduction of queue observing using UKT14 as a testbed in preparation for SCUBA (which will only operate using a queue system). This was run during a number of Director's shifts and has proved to be very successful and the lessons learned now will be extremely valuable for SCUBA. This is discussed by Firmin Oliveira elsewhere in this Newsletter.

Ian Robson,

Director, JCMT