1 m – APOGEE Feed Jon Holtzman Diane Feuillet (NMSU)

Construction and implementation of fiber feed from NMSU 1m to SDSS APOGEE funded by SDSS-III project and, especially, time of Nick MacDonald Builds off existing instrument at NA2 port on 1m, which has a pickoff mirror and camera for acquisition and guiding; note no image derotator at NA2 NMSU 1m has been used primarily in robotic mode for imaging

Fiber installed in the fall Software developed for control of APOGEE from 1m control system Initial test on handful of nights – Initial implementation of robotic observing for bright stars, 50+ stars per night seems plausible – Telescope performance (pointing stability) poorer than expected, investigation in progress – Throughput seems poorer than expected Only crude data reduction so far – Sky subtraction and, especially, telluric correction TBD Work to date

Status While we hope for improved performance, even with current performance, bright star program is probably feasible Original commitment was to give 3 nights/month to SDSS in exchange for implementation and use of instrument NMSU potentially interested in using significantly more, if robotic observing is feasible (but still would consider as collaboration data) In context of SDSS-IV, allows additional use of a northern spectrograph

As initially suggested by Leo Girardi, nearby sample of giants with known distances – Homogeneous sample with APOGEE – Estimate ages – Calibration of APOGEE – Test stellar evolution models Bright calibrators, stars of special interest (e.g. s-process rich stars) Bright asteroseismology stars Planet hosts As capability is demonstrated, we will solicit additional proposals – RV followup for fainter stars? Project(s)

Hope to have more time to work on this in next several months! Will try to start implementation of bright star program in next dark run