Applying for Time
Danny Lennon (Head of Astronomy, ING)
It is important that applicants
for telescope time familiarise themselves with the latest news on instrumentation
and detector combinations on offer, as well as with our scheduling restrictions.
For the very latest news always refer to the ING web pages, homepage
http://www.ing.iac.es. The ING’s general scheduling
constraints were summarised in the first issue of the Newsletter and will
not be repeated here, please refer to that issue, which is also available
on our public information web pages. Due to the increasing interest shown
by the community in applying to bring new visitor instruments to the WHT
we have introduced a technical appraisal form to try to smooth the transition
of these instruments from the laboratory to the telescope. This form is linked
to the New Visitor Instruments web page at
http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/observing/NewVisitorInstruments.html
and it must be completed and submitted along with any national application
form which proposes bringing a new visitor instrument to the WHT.
What’s New
The year 2003 saw many changes at the ING. On the positive side, and from
a visiting astronomer’s point-of-view, we saw the commissioning of the integral
field spectrograph OASIS at the AO focus of the WHT (
page
21), plus the first very successful commissioning run of the IR imaging
spectrograph LIRIS on the WHT (see the
cover page
and
page 15 of this issue). OASIS is currently available
to visiting observers, prospective applicants should contact Chris Benn (
crb@ing.iac.es) for help and information.
We hope to accept proposals for LIRIS in semester 2004B, pending the success
of its commissioning runs in 2004A. Users should note that for imaging, LIRIS
should provide very similar capabilities compared to INGRID, and therefore
it is envisaged that LIRIS will replace INGRID as the default Cassegrain
IR imaging device in the future (INGRID remaining at the AO focus).
As mentioned in the preceding section, visitor instruments continue to be
very successful in acquiring observing time at ING. Sometimes an opportunity
arises to offer these instruments for service mode observing, with the collaboration
of their development teams of course. ULTRACAM, an ultra-fast, triple-beam
CCD camera provided such an opportunity in 2003, we thank Vik Dhillon for
his cooperation in this venture. The available ULTRACAM service time was
hugely oversubscribed and we apologise to the many applicants who did not
receive any observations. However we hope to offer the instrument again in
2004, the announcement of opportunity will be sent via the usual [INGNEWS]
bulletin.
Other major changes have been the discontinuation of the JKT as a common
user telescope, and the decommissioning of IDS on the INT. We have also withdrawn
Telescope Operator support from the INT, which is now a single-instrument
telescope having just the WFC. Night-time support on the INT will be provided
by the ING student support group for the first night of each observing run
only, although an ING astronomer will continue to act as the scientific contact
for each observing run. While the INT/WFC is a rather easy telescope/instrument
combination for a single user to manage, applicants are reminded that it
is inadvisable to send unaccompanied inexperienced observers (student or
otherwise) to this telescope. Furthermore if the observing programme is demanding,
perhaps requiring a lot of real-time interaction, it is suggested that more
than one observer should be present.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos
(ORM) and Teide (OT) observatories invites applications for International
Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. The
ITP offers up to 5% of the observing time, evenly spread throughout the year
and the lunar cycle. An ITP proposal can request observing time over a period
of up to two subsequent years. Full details of the scheme for night-time
telescopes can be found at
http://www.iac.es/gabinete/cci/tinoc1.htm.
Proposals are considered on an annual cycle and the closing date for submission
of proposals to the 2004 ITP is Friday 6th February, for projects which may
start during the fall of the same year.
During 2004 it is expected that limited access to ING telescopes will be
granted to all EU astronomers under the auspices of Opticon, funded by EU’s
Sixth Framework Programme. Details are expected to be announced soon, interested
parties should refer to
http://www.otri.iac.es/eno/.
¤
Email contact: Danny
Lennon (
djl@ing.iac.es)
