By Eric Steinbring (Canadian Gemini Office, National Research Council Herzberg Astronomy & Astrophysics)
Gemini Phase II support from CGO
You can expect the same friendly CGO support as always, if recently awarded time in Semester 2025B. As is usual, PIs have until 18 July to upload their Phase II program of observations via the Observing Tool (OT); CGO staff are always happy to help answer questions, review and check the instrument settings, and provide advice on use of sky conditions, viability of guidestars, timing windows, etc., etc., etc. And, yes, sometimes just passing a keen eye over a program can spot something amiss, especially when the process is new to the PI. We know it’s a steep learning curve to become proficient with the OT: I’ll come back to that later in this article.
Additionally, beginning this month CGO will be extending that same support for Fast Turnound programs too, which are folded into the regular queue, but were previously just supported by Observatory staff. As always, please don’t delay, and start on the process (both regular semester and if awarded an FT program) as early as possible. Your program is important to us, but it isn’t our only one, so please always include the program number (e.g. GN-2025B-Q-123) in every e-mail subject-line. This helps keep the status of all the programs straight, while we work to respond at each major iteration (i.e. checking all “For Review” –> “For Activation”) in a timely way.
And potentially further along in the coming year
This extra support is a response to CGO trying to help with current staffing pressures at Gemini. Broader funding uncertainty for the National Science Foundation (NSF), under which NOIRLab and Gemini operate, is significant and is playing out within the US budgeting process this year. That, along with proposed drastic budget-cuts for NASA were, of course, a topic of discussion in many contexts at the recent (and awesome!) CASCA 2025 meeting Halifax. The CGO shares all Users’ concerns regarding the international scientific-funding landscape at the moment, and is following the situation closely.
Gemini South schedule and instrumentation news
The Gemini South Telescope Shutdown has been moved up to 7 July to 1 August in order to accomodate the pressure of a surplus of August-timeframe targets awarded at the ITAC (International Time-Allocation Committee) meeting. Lately, one instrumental “star” of Gemini-South has been GHOST (Gemini High-Resolution Optical Spectrograph). It was used by Gemini Fellow Emily Deibert to characterize the “puffy” atmosphere of HAT-P-70 (See: https://noirlab.edu/public/blog/ghost-spies-jupiter/). Emily gets a special Canuck shout-out as she recently also published a childrens’s book about hockey (https://www.emilydeibert.com/books). And although there have lately been no Canadian-led programs using it: the GeMS adaptive-optics system, and its sole imaging instrument (GSAOI) has had several, essentially weathered-out runs in the last year; retirement of this decade-old instrument is a consideration, as occured for the North’s NIFS (Near-infrared Integral Field Spectrograph) a few semesters ago.
And new software: DRAGONS and GPP
The DRAGONS 4.0 version was recently released, which now includes long-slit NIR spectroscopy, along with automatic reductions of all imaging and optical-spectroscopy modes for Gemini. There is only a few special modes that remain as “standalone” tasks for IRAF. A heads-up that IRAF will be unsupported once those modes are added to DRAGONS.
Something else hopeful to look forward to in the coming year or so is the introduction of the Gemini Program Platform (GPP). It will be the one-stop software for all steps in the process of taking data with Gemini: starting with investigating which instrument to choose (Phase 0) and the proposal process (Phase I). The GPP will prompt the User to select a target, wavelength-range, and signal-to-noise requirements for, say, the detection of a galaxy-emission line or to reach a particular photometric accuracy in stellar-pointsource imaging. This will do away with selection of sky-condition bands, and instead directly generate a skeleton observation, already at Phase I. And as I promised above, for most cases, this automation should actually avoid the need for human Phase II checking; having encapsulated that knowledge into the code.