Semester 15A – EAO Pilot Science
Submission Deadline:
For telescope time in
Semester 15A (1st March – 30th June 2015)
the closing date for receipt of proposals is
Tuesday 31 March 2015
15:00 Hawaiian Standard Time
DON’T PANIC
Yes: The deadline is after the start of the semester.
This is to give everyone a chance to partake, and to give the observatory
a chance to process applications that need access in March without waiting
until a ‘deadline’.
(Commissioning of POL-2 and FTS-2 will use much time in March).
Proposals will be processed as they are received ;
so : submit as early as possible to make best use of this opportunity.
Read on for further details . . .
- (Applicants from the University of Hawaii may have a different deadline).
- (A description of the submission process was given at the January Workshops).
NEWS for 15A
- This is the first semester for JCMT operating under the management of the East Asian Observatories. In this first, short semester EAO invites observing proposals from users in its partner nations (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), as well as from members of the contributing consortia in the UK and Canada. Proposals are not being invited from the wider ‘International’ community in 15A. Check here to check if you are eligible to submit as PI. Our intention in 15A is to encourage as many new users as possible to get experience with JCMT and prepare for future, larger programs.
- The amount of ‘science’ time per proposal in 15A should be no more than 30 hours. (‘Science’ time is the actual time spent observing source or sky, and excludes such observational overheads as pointings, focusses and astronomical calibrations.)
- Upon submission, each proposal will be assessed for technical feasibility by a JCMT support astronomer and feedback provided. Subsequently, submitted proposals can be retracted and resubmitted.
- There is no current Time Allocation Committee for JCMT; award of time and ranking of proposals within the flexible-observing queue system operated at JCMT will be effected by a committee of JCMT astronomers. Best efforts will be made to distribute awards amongst all applicants and to this end we encourage multi-national collaboration.
- Proposal submission is via Northstar and applicants are requested to use the sections of the Northstar form regarding Flexible Observing to express either
- their desire to obtain data ‘flexibly’ via the ranking system and normal JCMT flexible queue observing practices – i.e. without travelling to Hawaii to observe (default response), or
- their willingness and ability to travel and observe.
- Projects which request the heterodyne instruments and/or weather bands 4 and 5 are encouraged.
- SCUBA-2 may not be available immediately at the start of the semester, and POL-2 and FTS-2 are not being offered in this Call. Commissioning of both instruments will recommence in March, but neither is sufficiently well characterized at this time.
Important Notes
- There is only one ‘queue’ in semester 15A – called ‘International‘. The science and technical case should be limited to 2 pages; another page is available for figures & tables.
- Applicants are urged to itemize explicitly, in the Technical section of the proposal, their inputs to their integration time calculations. Output from the SCUBA-2 ITC can/should be copied&paste-d. This will allow the assigned Technical Assessor to confirm the proposal’s feasibility.
- We encourage use of the CADC database to check for previous observations that might satisfy your program needs (see p8 of the talk given at the January workshops and our JSA pages).
- JCMT normally operates a 12-hour night, running from approximately 7:30pm to 7:30am HST. Table A and Table B show source transit times during (roughly) the first and seconds halves of the year.
- Your proposal must specify the weather conditions (read opacity) that it requires or can tolerate.
The amount of time available per weather/opacity band varies through the year. - A summary of the telescope and its operations was given at the January Workshops
Contents
- Available Instrumentation and Observing Modes
- Proposal Submission
- Calculating Integration Times
- Availability of time and Opacity Statistics – average weather conditions
- The JCMT Users e-mail exploder – Keep informed.
Available Instrumentation and Observing Modes
Continuum Receivers –
- SCUBA-2 (simultaneous 450µm & 850µm imaging)
Heterodyne Receivers – General status
Heterodyne Backend
- ACSIS – Available bandwidths, spectral resolutions and backend modes.
- The ACSIS correlating spectrometer is a highly flexible backend; it was designed to work with HARP, but it works with all our heterodyne receivers.
Several modes of heterodyne observing and several switching schemes are supported.
See also the Instrumentation summary from the January Workshops
Calculating Integration Times
Integration time calculators or formulae are available, for
They should be used to calculate the integration time needed to reach a given RMS per channel or beam or output-map pixel as a function of receiver, frequency, observing mode, elevation and sky opacity.
The JCMT Observing Tool (JCMTOT) gives equivalent results for all instruments.
- Overheads for pointing, focussing, and calibrations should not be added to the time request. These activities will be accounted for separately.Calibration observations (eg. focus, pointing, flux calibrators) and other unavoidable overheads (eg receiver tuning) are no longer charged to science projects and instead are charged to an observatory accounting code. There is therefore no need for applicants to provide calibration overhead estimates in their proposals.The observatory will perform regular and appropriate calibration observations to ensure that all science data obtained are sensibly calibrated.
- Spectroscopically, this involves observations of one of our Spectral Line Standards at one of about ten different standard line frequencies . If your programme frequency is one of these, then you’re decidely in luck. In any case, the calibration allows you to assess the performance of the instrument. We will perform such an observation at least once per programme unless a previous calibration is still appropriate, and more often if circumstances change or if more than a couple of hours pass.
- For continuum work, continuum calibrators will be observed at both operational wavelengths of SCUBA-2 (450µm, 850µm) at appropriate times and airmass to meet the general needs of the science programmes.
If a proposal demands more unusual or more frequent calibrations then this needs to be clearly stated in the proposal and the time for these calibrations requested explicitly. If you have queries about what our default calibrations might be or what extra overheads are generated by your calibration requirements please get in touch with us.
Availability of time and Opacity Statistics
March, April, May and June offer a total of 122 nights (1464 hours) of observing time. The approximate division by activity is shown below:
| Available | Queue | E&C | POL-2 FTS-2 VLBI |
UH | EAO | UK | CA |
| 1464 | hours | 72 | 72 72 72 |
120 | 768 | 216 | 72 |
What actually gets observed will depend heavily upon the weather encountered.
Proposal Submission
Northstar is available for the 15A round of submissions. All users are advised to register, check and/or update their accounts. As mentioned in our Help page, you may, at first, have to accept the server certificate to gain access to Northstar. Except for the University of Hawaii, all proposals should be submitted
HERE.
If you already have a Northstar account you can login now! – new users should first register. Applicants should avoid using font sizes that are excessively small.
It is important that all applicants (PI & CoIs) and their national affiliations are listed on the proposal, so that an assessment can be made of how much observing time is being used by each partner organization. We suggest that you edit your Northstar profile to include
REMARK : Affiliation = China (or Japan or Taiwan or Korea or UK or Canada)
Flexible Scheduling
The overall philosophy of observing at JCMT is to match observing programmes to the weather. A summary was given at the January Workshops and new guidelines will appear here soon.
The JCMT Users e-mail exploder:
From time to time, subscribers to the ‘jcmt_users’ email list will receive notices on the status of the JCMT, call for proposals, etc. To subscribe, please send email to jcmt_users+subscribe@eaobservatory.org (no particular Subject or content is required).
And Finally:
If you’ve read all this and still have questions about the scheduling, the submission deadlines, the procedures, etc – please contact the helpdesk – or me.
Iain Coulson
JCMT Scheduler