promote that goal, the Gemini Director put
up some discretionary observing time (as a
prize) to go to the best two contributions received in the first few months!
The Users’ Committee for Gemini will be looking at all the postings and selecting the winners of the Discretionary Time competition.
The forum has a simple interface (Figure
13), using tags to keep track of topics by
type, and is intended to provide a user-supported, and more open, complement to the
Helpdesk — which will remain operated as
always, by the National Gemini Offices and
Gemini staff.
Operations Working Group
Meets in Hilo
The forum is young, but already there have
been quite a few postings by users, and
some useful scripts (e.g. for Integral Field
Unit data analysis, Gemini Near-Infrared
Spectrograph, cross-dispersed spectroscopy, general imaging reduction, etc.) by
both users and Gemini staff alike. If you’re a
graduate student involved in Gemini data, or
a seasoned veteran with your own package
to contribute, take a look at this forum and
don’t be shy with your contributions!
At the time of writing, the form hosts about
20 individual topic threads with a few dozen
postings and replies or followups. It also has
half a dozen scripts and packages, links to
reduction cookbooks (some by Gemini staff,
some by users), and some general threads
directed at answering specific queries.
In February, the Operations Working Group
held its 26th meeting in Hilo, just before issuing the 2014B Call for Proposals. From this
meeting emerged a number of resolutions
and actions, including an agreement that,
for users requiring good seeing, we relax
the full-width at half-maximum values corresponding to Image Quality 20 (IQ20), to
better reflect the actual frequency of occurrence. This will have the effect of reducing the
number of IQ20 programs that have aborted
sequences and is intended to increase the
completion rate of such programs.
With an increased focus on visiting instruments (particularly at Gemini North, while
several new instruments come online in the
south; Figure 14) the Working Group discussed how to best ensure that we increase
awareness and promote opportunities
within partner communities to solicit visitor
instruments for Gemini. To this end, the National Gemini Offices will be looking for such
opportunities within their partner countries.
Figure 14.
The Gemini North
visiting instrument DSSI
(Differential Speckle
Survey Instrument)
being mounted on the
Instrument Support
Structure of the Gemini
North telescope during
an observing run in 2013.
January 2015
2014 Year in Review
GeminiFocus
43