Within an hour you will receive an email informing you that your proposal has passed safely into the scheme, along with its unique reference code. If after 1h your programme does not appear in the status files, and if you do not receive an Email, please contact us.

The aim of the ING Service Programme is to provide astronomers with a means to obtain small sets of observations, which would not justify a whole night or more of telescope time. For each telescope several nights per month are set aside especially for this purpose. During these nights, La Palma support astronomers perform observations for several service requests.

The nights allocated to service for the Semester 2007 A are distributed across dark, grey and bright time, and more or less equally across the semester. They are also indicated in the Schedules as S and S/D in the reference number column.

Typical service programmes that are carried out are:

• long-term monitoring of variable sources
• pilot programmes (to test whether a project is feasible)
• completion of PATT or other programs which are missing a few short observations.
• checks of previously reported results (esp. where these are controversial or of low S/N.)
• stand-alone studies that require small amounts of observing time.
• targets-of-opportunity (e.g comets, asteroids, novae, supernovae)

There are several rules for people interested in sending in a service application:

• Proposals can only be submitted through the appropriate ING Service Form, and will be automatically checked for completeness.
• Service proposals are limited to four hours in total on the WHT and one night in total on the INT, including all overheads and calibration frames.
• All proposals lapse after 12 months, successful or not, and will be withdrawn from the Service Scheme.
• Time allocated by PATT (done in Service) will be scheduled for a particular night or nights which if cloudy will be deemed to be lost.

There is a monthly deadline for submission of proposals. Proposals are sent for scientific assessment at 0h on the first of each month to representative committees from the user communities, before becoming active in the scheme. Support Astronomers will attempt the highest graded proposals on any particular service night (dependent on weather and instrumental constraints). Applicants with proposals for genuine targets of opportunity should still use the Service Form, but should also alert the Service Manager by email, [service@ing.iac.es ], who will arrange for rapid scientific assessment to be carried out.

PI's whose proposals are attempted will be contacted by the Service Manager, shortly after the service night, usually via an ING Service Night Report. They will normally be asked to FTP the data back to their home site. We currently hope to keep data available on disk for about 2 weeks following a service night. After this time it will be retrievable from the ING archive.

The current status of proposals can be found from this list.

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Last Updated: March 8th, 2004 by Pierre Leisy(service@ing.iac.es)