JCMT

Call for Proposals for Observing Time

Semester 13B

Submission Deadline:

For telescope time in Semester 13B (1st August 2013 - 31st January 2014) the closing date for receipt of proposals is

(Applicants from the University of Hawaii have a different deadline).

NEWS for 13B

Important Notes

• Be sure to submit your proposal to the correct national queue.
  Submitting to the wrong queue may result in the rejection of the proposal.
• Applicants are urged to itemize explicitly, in the Technical section of the proposal, their inputs to their integration time calculations. This is essential to allow the assigned Technical Assessor to confirm the proposal's feasibility.
• The JCMT Board has decided that the science goals of
  • the JCMT Legacy Surveys (JLS),
  • the Guaranteed Time (GT) for the SCUBA-2 and POL-2 commissioning teams, and
  • the Staff Time (ST) awarded by the JCMT Board to JCMT staff for their role in the commissioning of SCUBA-2
  are all to be protected from duplication. If proposed targets overlap with those in the programmes above - as determined using the Clash Detector - applicants should ensure that sufficient justification is given in the proposal as to how and why the proposed observations and science differ from these projects. See below for complete details on how to check for such overlap.
• JCMT operates a 12-hour night, running from approximately 7:30pm to 7:30am HST. Earlier starts may compromise short-wavelength data. This table shows source transit times during semester B.
• Your proposal must specify the weather conditions (read opacity) that it requires or can tolerate.
  The amount of time available per weather/opacity band varies through the year.

          Contents
• Available Instrumentation and Observing Modes
• To Which Queue Should You Send Your Application? - Where's your home base ?
• Proposal Submission and results
• Calculating Integration Times

• Avoiding conflicts with protected science
• Availability of time and Opacity Statistics - average weather conditions
• Observer Status and Queue Observing - whether you should expect to travel to Hawaii - or not !
• The JCMT Users e-mail exploder - Keep informed.

Available Instrumentation and Observing Modes

Continuum Receivers -

• SCUBA-2 (simultaneous 450µm & 850µm imaging)
  • FTS-2 - The SCUBA-2 Fourier Transform Spectrometer (expected to be fully commisioned by the start of 13B)
  • POL-2 - The SCUBA-2 Polarimeter (expected to be fully commisioned by the start of 13B)

Heterodyne Receivers - General status

• RxA The relatively new 4 GHz-wide 'SMA' mixer, operating in the range 211-255GHz.
• HARP (325-375 GHz) - is a 16-element B-band array. Status & Characteristics
• RxW(D) (630-710 GHz) - Dual-channel receiver. Instrumental sensitivities should be used with caution.

Heterodyne Backend

• ACSIS - Available bandwidths, spectral resolutions and backend modes.
  • The ACSIS correlating spectrometer is a highly flexible backend; it was designed to work with HARP, but it works with all our heterodyne receivers.

Several modes of heterodyne observing and several switching schemes are supported and are described at http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/software/jcmtot/het_obsmodes.html.

Calculating Integration Times

Integration time calculators or formulae are available, for

• Heterodyne receivers : HITEC (the Heterodyne Integration TimE Calculator, including the 'new' RxA),
• SCUBA-2 ( Formulae)
• FTS-2
• POL-2

The JCMT Observing Tool (JCMTOT) gives equivalent results for all instruments except FTS-2 and POL-2.

• Overheads for pointing, focussing, and calibrations should not be added to the time request. These activities will be accounted for separately.

  Calibration observations (eg. focus, pointing, flux calibrators) and other unavoidable overheads (eg receiver tuning) are no longer charged to science projects and instead are charged to an observatory accounting code. There is therefore no need for applicants to provide calibration overhead estimates in their proposals.

  The observatory will perform regular and appropriate calibration observations to ensure that all science data obtained are sensibly calibrated.

  • Spectroscopically, this involves observations of one of our Spectral Line Standards at one of about ten different standard line frequencies . If your programme frequency is one of these, then you're decidely in luck. In any case, the calibration allows you to assess the performance of the instrument. We will perform such an observation at least once per programme unless a previous calibration is still appropriate, and more often if circumstances change or if more than a couple of hours pass.
  • For continuum work, continuum calibrators will be observed at both operational wavelengths of SCUBA-2 (450µm, 850µm) at appropriate times and airmass to meet the general needs of the science programmes.

  If a proposal demands more unusual or more frequent calibrations then this needs to be clearly stated in the proposal and the time for these calibrations requested explicitly. If you have queries about what our default calibrations might be or what extra overheads are generated by your calibration requirements please get in touch with us.

Avoiding conflicts with protected science

The JCMT Board has decided that the science goals of the JLS, GT and ST projects are to be protected against duplication by PI projects, and that scientific merit should be the guiding principle in cases of overlap. No regions of the sky are off-limits, but PIs who submit proposals to observe fields or science claimed by the protected projects will be required to provide additional justification for so doing. If that justification is not provided or is insufficient, time will not be awarded. It is anticipated that time will normally be awarded to PIs in such cases only when the observations represent an extension of the protected projects: e.g., in depth, in area or in frequency. (Note that these rules do not apply to the University of Hawaii queue.)

Applicants may identify potential conflicts using a web-based Clash Detector tool. Note, however, that the tool reports only positional clashes. To determine whether a reported clash constitutes a real conflict a comparison should also be made with the project depths at

• JLS : http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/JCMT/surveys/SurveyAllocations.html#depths.
• GT & ST : http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/JCMT/observing/gt_depths.html

Availability of time and Opacity Statistics

With approval of the JCMT Board, the JCMT Legacy Surveys will take 65% of the telescope time available in 13B after deduction of E&C and UH allocations. The hours available to do science in each national queue during 13B are likely to be as follows:

Summer months on Mauna Kea tend to be wetter than winter months. For how much time is generally available in certain weather bands at certain times of the year: click here (discussion reprinted from the Spring 2007 issue of the JCMT Newsletter). For example, during average winter months (Dec-April) 10-15% of the time is band 1, while in summertime the fraction is under 5%. Good weather is more frequent during El Nino. About 15% of the time we encounter band 5 weather, and as much again is lost entirely to bad weather.

Proposal Submission

If you have a Northstar account already you can login using your username and password; new users should register first.

Help regarding the submission process is available here - - - and in our Help pages ! Results are sent to applicants following the national TAG meetings (which are usually in May or November) and after ratification at the ITAC meeting (June or December).

To Which Queue Should You Send Your Application?:

Proposals should be submitted to the United Kingdom-, the Canadian-, or the International- queue, depending on the primary funding agency of the Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-Investigators (CoIs):

• If the PI is employed by a UK or Canadian institution then submit the proposal to the UK or Canadian queue respectively.
• If the PI is not employed by a UK or Canadian institution, but at least one of the Co-Is is employed by an institution from one of these two countries, then submit the proposal to the national queue of the first-named of those Co-Is.
• If neither the PI nor any of the Co-Is is employed by an institution in the UK or Canada, then the proposal must be submitted to the International queue.
• Employees of the JAC are considered as 'International', unless they are the PI.
• If you are in any doubt about where to submit, then please e-mail Iain Coulson.

Proposals sent to the wrong queue risk being rejected, as do proposals using font sizes smaller than those prescribed.

Observer Status and Flexible Observing

All queues now operate using dedicated observing blocks. The observer during these blocks is usually associated with one of the high-priority programmes to be observed, but is effectively running the entire (national) queue in a flexible manner. All applicants should anticipate the possibility that they may or may not be asked to be an observer for their national queue. Requests for 'classical' observer status should be explained in the "Scheduling Preferences" section of the proposal.

Flexible Scheduling

The JCMT Users e-mail exploder:

From time to time, subscribers to the 'jcmt_users' email list will receive notices on the status of the JCMT, call for proposals, etc. To subscribe, please visit http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/jcmt_users

And Finally:

If you've read all this and still have questions about the scheduling, the submission deadlines, the procedures, etc - please contact me.

Iain Coulson
JCMT Scheduler