It's already the third week of the 2017AB semester. In a break with routine, this semester will be 8 months long, ending on November 30. As in past semesters, if you'd like assistance with preparing your observing requests, please email our Science Support team.
Our community of FLOYDS users has expanded this semester, so we're putting extra effort into supporting FLOYDS. We've revised the FLOYDS webpage, and we've added a page describing the FLOYDS data pipeline. In addition, we want to make FLOYDS users aware of the following:
- The Sky (slit positioning) mode isn't working properly. We're actively working on fixing it.
- We will soon retire the qualitative descriptions of the slit sizes, e.g. "Floyds_large_slit", "Floyds_extra_large_slit". The quantitative descriptions (1.2, 1.6, 2.0, 6.0 arcsec) are exact and less likely to confuse.
We reduced the default airmass limit for observing requests at the start of the new semester. The default limit is now 1.6. Our statistics show that, in the first week of the new semester, several continuing users who submit their requests through the API were still setting the airmass limit to 2.0. Perhaps the larger limit is essential for those particular science targets, but if it's simply inertia, we encourage you to read our (brief!) guide to setting the airmass limit in the documentation section of our website.
Coming soon! During the week of May 22-25, LCO and the NOAO will jointly host a workshop on Time-Domain Alert Science and Infrastructure in Tucson. This is the first in a planned series of workshops and will include hands-on opportunities for LCO users to learn how to get the best out of observing with the network. The main goal of the workshop will be to discuss what technological and policy developments will be necessary to conduct time domain astronomy over the next decade, particularly in light of the high volumes of alerts expected from current and near-future surveys. We hope that you will attend. ----- If you're interesting in participating in a training session while at the workshop, please contact Rachel Street (rstreet@lco.global).
