During the last week the observing schedule was replanned to incorporate an observation of GRB150423A, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Apr 28. Scheduled observations of NGC4487 and MCG+01-32-049 were impacted by the replan and will be rescheduled in future weeks.

A Chandra press release was issued on Apr 30 describing results from a study that suggests a group of unusual giant black holes may be consuming excessive amounts of matter. Thick, donut-shaped disks may be surrounding the black holes, blocking much of the light that would otherwise be emitted. The black holes in these quasars may be growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/15_releases/press_043015.html

Also of note this week was the announcement on Apr 30 of the release of version 5.1 of MARX, a suite of programs designed to enable the user to simulate the on-orbit performance of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. For details see: http://space.mit.edu/ASC/marx/index.html Also announced was the availability, as of Apr 21, of Sherpa as an Open Source project with its source code repository available on GitHub (https://github.com/sherpa/sherpa). Sherpa is the CIAO modeling and fitting application. It enables the user to construct complex models from simple definitions and fit those models to data, using a variety of statistics and optimization methods.

The schedule of targets for the next two weeks is shown below and includes an observation of GRB 150314A, which is a Target of Opportunity follow-up accepted on Mar 19, observations of CXOU J171405.7-381031 and Centaurus A coordinated with NuSTAR, and observations of Praesepe coordinated with Kepler.