First Korean Time on Gemini
This semester, Gemini welcomes its first limited-term partner: Korea. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) has
taken on the job of coordinating the vetting
of proposals from all over Korea and producing “miniqueues,” which will be executed in
pre-scheduled blocks of time on both Gemini North and Gemini South.
Figure 1.
Principal Investigator
Steve Howell works on
DSSI at Gemini North
during a previous visit
of the instrument.
Figure 2.
The first Korean
observing team at
Gemini North, shown
here while making
observations in March.
limited visible imaging at two wavelengths
simultaneously, was designed as a followup camera for confirming objects of interest discovered by NASA’s Kepler exoplanet
discovery mission (by ruling out chance coincidences of a Kepler field star with a background variable, for example). Although
DSSI was usually scheduled to coincide with
the observability of the Kepler field, in Cygnus, the camera has been used on a wide
variety of science during runs undertaken
to date. For Semester 2015B, the team (led
by Steve Howell and Elliott Horch of the
NASA-Ames Research Center and Southern
Connecticut State University, ɕ