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.
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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