New Observing Proposal Submission Procedures

Proposals for observing time at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and Kitt Peak National Observatory should now be submitted to NOAO-Tucson. As mentioned in an accompanying article in this section of the Newsletter, a new SCience OPErations Division has been formed at NOAO--one of its duties is processing observing proposals for the NOAO nighttime programs.

Investigators now have three ways to submit observing proposals:

1. NOAO is now accepting proposals through the Web at http://www.noao.edu/noaoprop/. Information is entered on a series of Web forms, and is then formatted and submitted as a LaTeX file along with any Encapsulated PostScript figures that are "attached" to the Web proposal. Documentation, including a short LaTeX guide, is provided online.

2. Proposals may be submitted by email to noaoprop-submit@noao.edu using a LaTeX template and style file. The files necessary for building the proposal are available from our anonymous FTP archive at ftp.noao.edu in the noaoprop directory. A README file is part of the distribution files and contains information necessary to complete the proposal. These files have been modified from those used during the last proposal period, so please be sure to get the new files. A subset of the files can also be obtained by sending email to noaoprop-request@noao.edu.

3. Proposals are still being accepted on paper, but investigators should be aware that this type of submission has an earlier deadline (see the accompanying article in this section of the Newsletter). A blank proposal form may be requested from the NOAO Proposal Office, SCience OPErations Division, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, P.O. Box 26732, Tucson, AZ 85726-6732 (US mail) or 950 North Cherry, Tucson, AZ 85719 (overnight). A blank proposal form is also available from our FTP archives, mentioned above, as the file blank.ps. The completed proposal form should be sent to the NOAO Proposal Office at one of the addresses given above.

If you have questions about or problems with NOAO's submission procedures, please contact us at noaoprop-help@noao.edu. We will respond as quickly as we can to help you.

Todd Boroson