GeminiFocus 2015 Year in Review | Page 34

With a total budget of $200,000, we were looking for compelling proposals requesting up to the whole budget, as well as those asking for minimal, or even no funding from Gemini. Each selected project will receive up to one night (10 hours) of observing time to be used for demonstrating the scientific potential of the upgraded instrument. Figure 2. Presentation by Antonio de Ugarte Postigo on the OCTOCAM GIFS study during a review of all submitted Feasibility Study reports in late September 2015. er, the studies’ outputs are not instrument design for build proposals; Gemini will use the GIFS studies to help inform the requirements that will go into the call for Gen4#3. The community can now read the final reports and presentations from each team and provide comments and pose questions to: [email protected]. Before completing the set of requirements for Gen4#3, Gemini will consider any comments received by December 22, 2016; we particularly welcome feedback on the science requirements, technical capability, and design aspects. After January 22nd, Gemini will consider the community’s input, along with recommendations from our advisory committees, to produce the Gen4#3 Request for Proposals (RfP). We are working towards a 2016 Q2 release of the RfP. Please visit the Gen4#3 home page for the latest information. Instrument Upgrade — Small Projects Proposals Gemini is committed to keeping our operational instrumentation competitive and to serving the needs of our user community. The Observatory also has a responsibility to provide major upgrades to the telescopes and their adaptive optics systems and associated instrumentation. To this end, in October we issued a request for the community to send us small-scale instrument upgrade proposals as part of our Instrument Upgrade Program. 32 GeminiFocus At the time of writing, we have received letters of intent and are excitedly anticipating receiving proposals by the December 17th deadline. We expect to quickly evaluate proposals and begin one or more instrument upgrade projects in 2016 Q1. For further announcements visit this site. October 2015 GMOS-South New CCDs: Performing Entirely to Specification Soon after the commissioning of the new Hamamatsu CCDs in the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph at Gemini South (GMOS-S) in August 2014, we noticed that when observing in any of the binned readout modes, saturated pixels produced a decrease of counts with respect to the bias level in neighboring pixels. This effect, known as “banding,” spanned the entire width of the amplifier, and while it did not destroy information, it rendered data reduction very cumbersome. Making matters worse was the saturation of a bad column on amplifier number 5 (on CCD2, the middle one in the focal plane) that affected the entire amplifier. When a team of Gemini instrument scientists and engineers investigated the issue, they identified the root cause of the problem as the Astrophysical Research Cameras (ARC) controller video boards. Representatives from ARC suggested that we try a new revision of the video boards they now had 2015 Year in Review January 2016