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Telescope Time Requests (1Jun95) (from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) Telescope time requests for second semester 1995 were at a near record high, as summarized in the tables that follow. This is in part due to a substantial increase in 1.5-m proposals, some of which at least appear to have been diverted to CTIO by closure of the KPNO 1.3-m telescope. The mix of instruments requested is similar to that in past second semesters. Electronic Submission The percentage of electronic submissions continues to increase, with the total now at roughly 90%. In fact, the 10% of "manual" submissions are mostly from local staff or astronomers who happened to be visiting CTIO in late March; the number of proposals sent by mail was less than a dozen. The fraction of the proposals including figures (encapsulated PostScript) continues to increase as well, as well as the complexity (and disk space occupied - some 30+ Mb total) of the figures; nearly half of the electronic submissions now include figures. The volume on the last day approached 10% of the capacity of the satellite link. Unfortunately, not all of the electronic submissions are problem-free. There were still several cases where the proposer obviously did not process and print out the version actually submitted, since these contained fatal (and usually obvious) LaTeX errors. There were a couple of other cases where people did not read the instructions (or look at the sample files) and submitted disconnected proposals and figures. At present, the number of such cases is small, so it is possible to take the time to deal with each individually; if the number of problem proposals continues to increase, we may be forced to become less tolerant. It is also worth noting people's tendency to submit at the absolute last minute ---roughly 1/3 of the proposals arrived during working hours 31 March, and another 1/3 arrived after work but before midnight. (This tendency was strongest for the extragalactic proposals---time dilation due to redshift perhaps?) While there is a certain amount of flexibility---we did not reject the proposal that came in at two minutes after midnight, for example---it has its limits, especially when it comes to dealing with proposals that can't be processed and require fixes. As a reminder, the current forms are available by ftp, from the CTIO Mosaic home page, or by sending an e-mail to ctioprop-request@noao.edu. The comments in the template file and the instruction file include current information on instruments available, submission procedures, etc. Therefore, even though the current form (or last semester's form) is acceptable, you may find it helpful to get the most recent version before submitting a proposal. Jay Elias (jelias@noao.edu)
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