Markus Kissler-Patig
Director’s Message
Large and Long Programs are here (and so much more).
With the start of Semester 2014B, Gemini’s new Large and Long programs have begun. The
Gemini Board selected seven, which can be viewed here. The scheme was largely oversubscribed, by a factor of five to six, compared to the standard programs that typically oversubscribe by about half that amount.
The start of the Large and Long programs also initiated our Priority Visitor (PV) observing
mode (view PV here). PV runs essentially mitigate the weather, as classical observers can
stay longer than their allocated number of nights; during that period, they chose when
to observe their program. The rest of the time, the visitors, assisted by Gemini staff, have
to observe the programs of their peers. The first PV runs have been extremely successful,
and we anticipate an increased number of users taking advantage of this mode, especially
when we offer it in 2015B to all programs.
Interestingly, the first PV observers also took advantage of Gemini’s “Bring One, Get One” offer to subsidize students and young career astronomers when they accompany senior classical observers (view here). Thus, we had a lively populated control room for the nine nights
of the first Large and Long program, as well as this July’s visiting instrument run with the
Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (see the report in this issue, starting on page 24).
As the Large and Long programs rolled out, we continued to prepare the deployment of our
third new mode for requesting time on the Gemini telescopes: namely, the Fast Turnaround
program. This mode allows users to obtain data only a few weeks after submitting their proposals. The scheme’s final design review was passed in April, and the Gemini Board gave its
go-ahead in May. The Canadian National Gemini Office kindly ran the peer-review component experimentally in parallel with the most recent time-allocation process. We included
October 2014
GeminiFocus
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