NOAO Nighttime Proposals Due for 1999A

Proposals for observing time for the 1999A semester (February 1999-July 1999) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and Kitt Peak National Observatory are due Wednesday, 30 September 1998, Midnight MST. Proposals submitted on paper are due a week earlier, on 23 September 1998 at 5pm MST.

There are three ways to submit an observing proposal:

• Through a Web form available at http://www.noao.edu/noaoprop/. The information provided on the Web form is formatted and submitted as a LaTeX file, including figures that are "attached" to the Web proposal as Encapsulated PostScript files. Documentation, including a short LaTeX guide, is provided online.

• By e-mail to noaoprop-submit@noao.edu using our 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. Also see the CHANGES file for any late-breaking news, such as instrument configuration or policy changes that may affect your proposal preparation (see accompanying article in this section).

• Proposals are still being accepted on paper; however, investigators should be aware that this type of submission has an earlier deadline, as noted above. A blank proposal form may be requested from the NOAO Proposal Office, SCience OPErations Division, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, PO Box 26732, Tucson, AZ, 85726-6732 (US mail) or 950 N. Cherry, Tucson, AZ, 85719 (courier). 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.

Although we plan no major modifications to the LaTeX template and style file for the 1999A proposal form, there are changes to instructions in these files and to instructions and lists of available instruments in the README file. Be sure to update these files if you plan to submit your proposal by e-mail. All changes will be incorporated into the Web-based form.

100% of the proposals for the last observing proposal semester were submitted electronically. The NOAO proposal team would like to thank the astronomy community for their cooperation in helping us meet this long-awaited goal!

The NOAO Proposal Team