In late October 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. SPIREX/Abu is a 60-cm aperture telescope with a 1024 × 1024 InSb detector array. Approximately 30% of the time during the next austral winter (March-October 1999) will be made available to the astronomical community through a peer-review process.
Caption: 555 minute composite of 30 Doradus taken with the L filter using the SPIREX/Abu facility. The data were provided courtesy of the Abu team with special thanks to Mike Merrill (NOAO) for the image processing.
The Abu IR instrument/detector combination provides a spectral range of 2.4-4.8 µm, with a pixel scale of 0.6" per pixel and a field-of-view of 10.2' on a side. All observing will be done in queue mode. Ian Gatley (Rochester Institute of Technology) and his team at will lead all aspects of the observing program and distribution of data. See more about this capability and sample data on the NOAO SPIREX/Abu Web page at http://www.noao.edu/scope/south_pole/.
The deadline for proposals for this observing opportunity is Tuesday, 1 December 1998, at Midnight MST. We were unable to provide more advanced notice of this opportunity through the NOAO Newsletter, since it was decided to go forward with this plan after the September issue was printed and distributed. Fortunately, we were able to distribute information about this observing opportunity through the AAS Newsletter, the AAS Electronic Announcements, and our own e-mail exploder. Proposals are being accepted through the NOAO Web-based proposal form (with slight modifications to accommodate this facility)—-see the URL http://www.noao.edu/noaoprop/.
Questions about the instrument and its capabilities may be directed to Nigel Sharp (nsharp@noao.edu) or Mike Merrill (mmerrill@noao.edu). Questions about the proposal process may be directed to noaoprop-help@noao.edu.
Todd Boroson