Yale Astronomy Department Telescope Time Allocation

Proposal due dates

Proposals are solicited for Yale observing time on the SMARTS telescopes, WIYN, and the Keck telescopes. Full proposals are due on the first Friday of March for the B semester and the first Friday of September for the A semester. Pre-proposals for WIYN and Keck are due a week before the proposal deadline, also on Friday. For 2010B, the deadline is Friday March 5, 2010. Pre-proposals for WIYN and Keck are due on Friday, February 26, 2010.

Pre-proposal procedures

Pre-proposals for WIYN and Keck should list the intended telescope (WIYN, Keck I or Keck II), instrument, number of nights, lunar phase, and the possible observing period (e.g., "Oct-Dec").

The pre-proposal information will be made available on a website so that proposers can amend their proposals based on the anticipated proposal pressure for a particular telescope,time of year, and/or lunar phase. The pre-proposal information only serves to help spread proposals over these parameters: the actual proposal may obviously deviate from the pre-proposal, and the pre-proposal will not be taken into account in the TAC process.

Completed pre-proposals should be sent to Victoria Gardner.

Proposal form and submission

Time requests for all telescopes and instruments should be formatted using the following form:

yaleprop.tex (example proposal) | yprop10B.sty (latex style file to use) | yaleprop.pdf (pdf file of example)

Completed proposals should be sent to Victoria Gardner.

Submitted proposals are posted on a password protected website for TAC review.

TAC procedures

The astronomy department revised its telescope allocation procedures in 2008. The new procedures can be found in this document. These procedures were reviewed in December of 2009 and remain unchanged.

Facility offerings

Yale has a large amount of time, but some of it is pre-allocated to programs that provide financial and administrative support to SMARTS. There are about 45 nights per semester available for programs that do not provide resources (note that these are "user nights" for traditional observing - service observing costs 1.5 x traditional observing, and is based on 9 hrs/night). If proposers can provide some resources (dollars, or occasionally other kinds of support) then we can get more nights - please see Charles Bailyn about this possibility if you are interested.

For semester 2010B (August 09-January 10) SMARTS will continue to offer five instruments on four telescopes. Note also the observing modes:

1.5m telescope: Spectroscopy with RCSpec (low res) or echelle (high res) Service observing only. Monitoring or ToO programs are supported. Gratings 47 and 26 are greatly favored for the RC Spec - others are allowed, but may be unschedulable. Observations are quite restricted when 9 <LST<19.

1.3m telescope: Optical and IR photometry with ANDICAM. BVRIJHK only. Service observing only. No more than 1 hr/night per program except in special cases. Monitoring and ToO programs are strongly encouraged.

1.0m telescope: Optical photometry with Y4KCam (20 arcminute field 4K x 4K). Traditional observing only. Many filters available (see CTIO list). This telescope is often undersubscribed, especially for bright time, so we can sometimes exceed our official allocation.

0.9m telescope: Optical photometry with 2K camera (13 arcminute field). Many filters available (see CTIO list). Both traditional observing and service observing are available, in a week-on/week-off pattern. Traditional observers should apply for a full week of observing. Service observing is allocated mostly in full, or at the least half, nights, so monitoring/ToO programs are hard to accomodate on this telescope.