10 April 2002

During the first half of semester 2002A NIRI has performed well. Several observing runs have now produced some science data for 7 queue programs in scientific ranking bands 1 and 2. Our main frustration has been the weather, which has consistently failed to cooperate since the end of last year. The data we have taken look quite good, although some were taken during poorer weather conditions than we would have liked. NIRI promises to deliver excellent data when we get some good seeing and clear, dry weather.

During times when the weather was too poor to open, NIRI was used to test the facility polarization unit GPOL, which was recently installed on the Gemini North telescope. Additional commissioning with NIRI on the sky will be started during the first week of May.

The NIRI web pages have been updated to include new filters that have arrived, changes in the spectroscopic slit lengths, updated instructions for preparation of Phase II proposals, suggestions for calibrations, and so forth. We encourage to you have a look from time to time, and especially when preparing Phase II programs. We are also in the process of developing better data reduction scripts. The NIRI imaging scripts are in fairly good shape and seem to work reliably. Updated imaging reduction scripts were released with the Gemini IRAF package version 1.3 in March.

Last update Apr. 10, 2002; Joe Jensen