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R. W. Romani (Stanford University)
The HET offers consortium members, and the US community, a lot of aperture for a modest cost. With a dark site, efficient cameras and spectrographs and (perforce) queue scheduled operation, this facility encourages us to contemplate some innovative faint object science. However, in the era of 8m-class apertures, it is essential that we keep in mind the constraints imposed by the HET's unique design and by the site in forming competitive observational programs. Experience during early observations will drive this lesson home, but some thought has already gone into using the HET efficiently. Deep observations covering limited fields, high energy survey identifications, monitoring of source variations from msec to hours, orbit-phased data sets, and studies of transients and stochastic variability stand out as areas where the HET should prove effective. In many cases the targets have modest flux and so the large aperture is essential for making measurements on the short required timescales. A sample of programs being contemplated by the smaller HET partners illustrates the sort of compact and faint object science that may be done with this facility; similar projects may be of interest to those acquiring time through NOAO.