During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned.

A real-time procedure was executed on Dec 9 to perform a full-frame dark current readout of the Aspect Camera Assembly CCD. A second real-time procedure was executed on Dec 12 to enable and disable edge blanking on the HRC-I. This benign sequence of commands was done to demonstrate a procedure which will be used again later to validate HRC team operations at the new Operations Control Center.

Preparations are complete for the winter 2018 eclipse season; the season contains eight eclipses and runs from Dec 12 to 30. Real-time procedures were executed on Dec 11 to prepare for the first eclipse: one to activate SCS 29 and one to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters. Chandra passed through the first eclipses of the winter season on Dec 12 and Dec 14 respectively with nominal power and thermal performance.

Of note this week was the release on Dec 13 of the Cycle 21 Call for Proposals. The proposal submission deadline is 14 March 2019. In conjunction with the call was the release of the CIAO 4.11 analysis software system, CALDB 4.8.2, MARX 5.4.0, and CXCDS 10.7.1 for standard processing. This update includes HRC-I time-dependent gain map corrections, replacement of the current set of time dependent QE Uniformity (QEU) files, correction of the HRC-I GMAP Header, and the PIMMS cycle 21 effective areas. For details see: http://cxc.harvard.edu/caldb/downloads/Release_notes/CALDB_v4.8.2.html

A Chandra photo release was issued on Dec 13 describing an image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, which shows a dramatic galactic fountain in action. Large amounts of gas fall toward a supermassive black hole, where a combination of gravitational and electromagnetic forces sprays much of the gas away from the black hole in an ongoing cycle lasting tens of millions of years. For details see: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2018/a2597/

The schedule of targets for next week is shown below and includes observations of V773Tau coordinated with NuSTAR.