Observing at the South Pole

Austral Winter (March - October 1999)

NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation

Community Access to the South Pole Facility SPIREX

The Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) announced the availability of telescope time on the SPIREX/Abu facility at the South Pole in October 1998 with a proposal deadline of December 1. This is a 60 cm aperture telescope with a 1024 x 1024 InSb detector array. Approximately 30% of the time during the 1999 austral winter (March through October) was made available to the astronomical community through a peer-review process.

All observing will be queue observing. Ian Gatley and his team at the Rochester Institute of Technology will lead the observing program, including scheduling, communications with the queue observing team, the data pipeline, and the transfer of data to investigators. Data are returned from the South Pole over a NASA-maintained satellite link which runs for a few hours a day (when the satellite is visible from the pole). All South Pole experimenters are very grateful to NASA networking and the South Pole TDRSS Relay team for this service.

Information for Investigators

Instrument/detector information:

Spectral range: 2.4 microns - 4.8 microns
Scale: 0.6 arcsec/pixel
Field-of-view: 10.2 arc minutes on a side (see the bad pixel mask)

Filters

System sensitivity and observing strategies including exposure times

Sample data

Contact Scientists: Nigel Sharp, Mike Merrill

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National Optical Astronomy Observatories, 950 North Cherry Avenue, P.O. Box 26732, Tucson, Arizona 85726, Phone: (520) 318-8000, Fax: (520) 318-8360

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Last updated: 20Feb1999