Andy Adamson
Operations Corner
With GeMS/GSAOI science going along well in 13A, FLAMINGOS-2 currently
in recommissioning, and both instruments now fully offered in the 13B call,
this edition of Operations Corner looks at the upcoming semester with a brief
review of the International Time Allocation Committee results, anticipating
commissioning work at Gemini South, and visiting instruments making for an
interesting time at Gemini North. Gemini South engineering operations have
been very busy, and we describe two major pieces of work done on the telescope
top end and on the enclosure. Finally we post a reminder about data checking,
which has undergone a significant change in the north (and is undergoing the
same change in the south).
Semester 2013B
The International Time Allocation Committee (ITAC) process has just been completed for Semester 2013B. Our thanks once again go out to all of the referees, assessors, and TAC representatives for their hard work. Highlights include the fact that both the Differential Speckle
Survey Instrument (DSSI), a speckle camera, and the Texas Echelon cross Echelle Spectrograph
(TEXES), a mid-infrared instrument, were awarded significant amounts of time on Gemini North,
both to the instrument teams and to other investigators. DSSI will visit for close to a week in
July, and TEXES will return to the telescope for 90
hours in November. The visitor instruments were
oversubscribed by factors of two and three, respectively (DSSI and TEXES). In the south, GeMS/
GSAOI proved popular, oversubscribing the available time by a factor of two. The two southern
newcomers (FLAMINGOS-2 and GeMS/GSAOI)
took a third of the time allocated, with FLAMINGOS-2 taking approximately the same fraction of
the observing time as the Gemini Near-Infrared
Spectrograph (GNIRS) at Gemini North.
July2013
GeminiFocus
Figure 1.
Gemini North
time allocations
by instrument in
Semester 2013B.
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