Proposal Submission System

Call for Proposals 2008B

Requests for observing time for the Baade, Clay, du Pont, and Swope telescopes at Las Campanas are due Friday, April 18, 2008. A complete proposal will consist of no more than six pages of text accompanied by bibliography and figures. Please do not append preprints or reprints to your proposal.

Proposals are submitted via the Carnegie web based proposal pages. Each Principal Investigator will be required to register at

http://www.ociw.edu/Proposals/join_form

before being granted access to the web forms

Once you are registered, you may login at

http://www.ociw.edu/Proposals/login_form

For instructions on adding, editing, and submitting your proposals, see:

http://www.ociw.edu/Proposals/help

If you already registered for, or after, the 2007B semester proposal round then your userid and password are still valid, and you do not need to re-register.

Each person proposing to observe at Las Campanas in 2008B should submit a single proposal outlining the research program or programs that he or she wishes to pursue there. The Principal Investigator is the person to whom the time will be assigned. The PI or one of the Co-Investigators listed on the proposal is expected to be present at the telescopes on the assigned nights. PI's should be Staff Members, Staff Associates, Visiting Research Associates or postdocs of Carnegie Observatories, Staff Members or Fellows of DTM. Co-Investigators should be from this group or experienced observers of similar standing at other institutions, including Las Campanas Observatory. The names of the intended observers should be stated on the proposal cover page.

All Magellan observers should read the Magellan Telescopes Observer Guidelines found at http://www.lco.cl/lco/observer-inf/visiting-observer.

All observers on LCO telescopes should follow the Observer Deadlines described at http://www.lco.cl/lco/observer-deadlines/observer-deadlines.

The proposal should clearly indicate whether a research program is part of a long term investigation. If so it should indicate what has been accomplished in earlier years and when completion is expected. Those granted time will be expected to submit a brief annual report.

If you are proposing to work on more than one project, or are a co-investigator on someone else's project, please indicate your relative priority for each project

Postdocs MUST arrange to discuss their current research and observing proposals with at least two members of the Allocation Committee before proposals are submitted. The TAC members are Alan Boss, Alan Dressler, Dan Kelson, Barry Madore, Andy McWilliam, and Ian Thompson.

For the Baade and Clay telescopes, this proposal round will cover the second semester of 2008 running from July 25 through January 18, 2009. A detailed block schedule can be found here. The 2008B du Pont runs are: July 25 - August 3, August 23 - August 28, September 29 - October 4, November 25 - December 4, and December 29 - January 4, 2009. The open Swope runs are: June 6 - June 12, June 16 - June 18, June 26 - July 26, July 30 - August 7, and August 10 - August 15.

In the appropriate place of the application form please indicate:

(a) A project number for each project. Please be sure to cross reference the project and observing run numbers with the description of the proposed observing in the scientific justification.

(b) A list of collaborators for each project.

(c) Your preference(s) for assigned runs (e.g., "L4 or L5"; "D4").

(d) The absolute value in days of the amount of moonlight you can tolerate (|7| = quarter; |14| = full). Please briefly justify need for dark time as part of your scientific justification.

(e) Any additional information that will bear on the specific assignment of nights.

(f) Please supply an object list with approximate RA, Dec; if there are many (8) distributed over a range of RA, give RA range (e.g., "50 QSO candidates at 32, 0h2h") for each of your projects.

Instrumentation:

A description of the instrumentation available for use on the Baade, Clay, du Pont and Swope telescopes can be found at http://www.lco.cl/lco. Observers are encouraged to read this material, there have been numerous changes to the configuration and availability of certain instruments.

The following instruments are available on the Magellan telescopes:

Baade: IMACS, MagIC, and PANIC

Clay: LDSS3, MagE, MIKE, and MIKE (fibers)

A draft user's manual for MagE can be found at http://www.ociw.edu/Instrumentation/MagE/MagEManual/mage.html.

A limited number of nights will be available for block scheduling of the IMACS tunable filter. Information about the MMTF can be found in the IMACS manual and at http://www.astro.umd.edu/~veilleux/mmtf.

Travel to Chile:

The Observatories' travel budget will cover up to three trips to Las Campanas per year. If you are requesting more trips, please indicate that you have travel funding. Observers with grant travel money are requested to use these funds before requesting Observatories' funds. Every effort to consolidate trips will be made during the scheduling process.

Observing Fees:

All visitors to Las Campanas other than Carnegie scientists will normally be expected to pay charges for room and board and technical support ($40.00 per night). This will include collaborators of Carnegie scientists. All accounts must be settled before leaving La Serena.

Masks for the WFCCD or the LDSS3 spectrographs cost $35.00 per mask to manufacture. Masks for the IMACS spectrograph will cost approximately $200.00 per mask.

2008 Observing Calendar