THE ING NEWSLETTER No. 2, March 2000
GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION OTHER NEWS FROM ING TELESCOPE TIME
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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. PPARC issue the PATT newsletter electronically, about one month before application deadlines, which contains up-to-date information on instrument availability. However for the very latest news always refer to the ING web pages, homepage http://www.ing.iac.es, where application forms and style files may also be obtained. The ING's scheduling constraints were summarised in the first issue of the ING Newsletter and will not be repeated here, please refer to that issue, which is also available on our Public Information web pages. Applications should be submitted by email only, by the appropriate deadline and no earlier than one month before that deadline, to ingpatt@ing.iac.es.
What's New
The 2-chip CCD mosaic, consisting of two 4k × 2k EEV detectors, was successfully commissioned on the prime focus of the WHT, see the article by Simon Tulloch in this issue for further details. Commissioning on UES is due to be completed in early 2000, no problems are foreseen. One of the important advantages which this will offer over the 2k × 2k SITe detector is an increased maximum resolving power of 80,000. However, due to fringing problems with the EEVs in the red, the SITe will remain the detector of choice with UES if one is working beyond about 6000Å. Some testing will be done to quantify the fringing problem with the EEVs on UES during commissioning.
INGRID commissioning slipped from January 2000 (99B) into March 2000. The 99B commissioning slots were re-allocated to three PATT 2000A proposals (P/2000A/4, 6 and 8), many thanks to Tom Marsh and Sean Ryan for coming out at very short notice for these observing runs. NAOMI commissioning, using INGRID, is now scheduled for June and July in semester 2000A. Prospective users of INGRID should keep a check on its homepage at: http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/instruments/ingrid/">, or contact Chris Packham for the latest information. For the latest on NAOMI, please contact Chris Benn. Note that the slippage in INGRID has also had a knock-on effect for small fibres on AF2, and they will now not be commissioned in 2000A.
As discussed by René Rutten in this issue, both LDSS and TAURUS were withdrawn as common-user instruments, and offered to the community for adoption. Both instruments received bids and indeed LDSS is back on the WHT as a visitor instrument in 2000A. Anyone interested in using LDSS in future semesters should contact Richard Bower at Durham (R.G.Bower@durham.ac.uk). It seems likely that TAURUS will also be adopted, subject to the successful completion of some ongoing discussions.
In the last issue we proposed two possible ways of reducing operational costs of the JKT, either by providing a day-time introduction only or providing night-time support using students. We settled on the latter solution and night-time support on the JKT is now provided mainly by Rachel Curran and Dan Batcheldor. Rachel and Dan are undergraduates from Hertfordshire University, on a one year placement scheme, and besides providing JKT support are working on science projects supervised by ING astronomy staff. (Dan is working a project concerning supernovae environments supervised by Nic Walton, while Rachel's project is on the use of radio galaxies to probe the dust in spiral galaxy disks and is supervised by Chris Benn.)
Service
The service program is now managed by Ian Skillen, the ING Scheduler and Technical Secretary to PATT. Service users with time-critical programs in particular are reminded that there is no guarantee of a program being carried out on a particular service night. Time-critical observations are carried out on a best efforts basis only. This is due to a number of factors, among them instrument availability, grade and nationality (we aim for a balance between all three allocation panels). For time-critical observations, especially for those where it is possible to predict the frequency of events, it might be better applying for an over-ride proposal through the normal PATT/NL channels. At present, time-critical service proposals do not have over-ride status on service nights, or indeed any other night, while approved over-ride programs can over-ride service nights, as well as UK and NL scheduled nights.
Service users are also reminded that the time limit of INT and JKT programs has now been increased from three to five hours.
Email contact: Danny Lennon (djl@ing.iac.es)
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GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION OTHER NEWS FROM ING TELESCOPE TIME © Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes