Gemini staff contributions
News for Users
Base Facility Operations are underway at Gemini South . Interest continues to grow for visiting instruments . Gemini prepares to enter the era of followups on large , time-domain surveys . And adverse winter weather impacts Gemini North , while providing opportunities for Band 4 / Poor Weather proposals .
Figure 1 .
Javier Fuentes ( left ) and Joy Chavez ( right ) operating Gemini South from the La
Serena Base Facility on November 14 , 2016 .
Base Facility Operations Begin at Gemini South
Since late 2015 , the Observatory has operated Gemini North at night from its Hilo Base Facility with no staff at the telescope facility on Maunakea . Gemini South has now followed suit ; as of November the Base Facility Operations ( BFO ) project began full remote operations in La Serena , Chile . As promised in the January 2016 issue of GeminiFocus , in the interest of efficiency we copied much of the Gemini North project and pasted it into place at Gemini South , making this task as straightforward as possible . Along the way we made one or two locally-specific amendments and some minor improvements .
Prior to November , we had already operated in “ Base ” mode with night staff at the summit of Cerro Pachón for more than two months — progressively confining them to the control room as we added more and more monitoring capabilities and remote control options to the summit systems . On November 14th we were ready as planned , and the nighttime staff carried out the
12 GeminiFocus January 2017