Science Operations Announcements

Gemini North Shutdown Extended due to COVID-19

September 8th, 2021

Due to the recent spike of COVID-19 cases in Hawai'i the Gemini North engineering shutdown has been extended through the end of the day on Friday, September 17, and the 2021B telescope schedule has been updated accordingly. The MAROON-X visiting instrument block will start as scheduled on Tuesday, September 21, however, the NIFS installation has been postponed until December.

Observing databases offline June 8

June 7th, 2021

The Gemini observing databases will be offline for several hours on Tuesday, June 8 while we perform software updates.

During this time the following services will be unavailable:

  • Observing Tool synchronizations and file transfers
  • Phase I Tool guide star probability queries
  • Target of Opportunity triggers

The new 2021B Observing Tool will be available after the update and will be required to access the observing databases.

Virtual machine image for running IRAF under recent MacOS releases

May 19th, 2021

A CentOS 7 virtual machine image (OVA file) is now available to facilitate running Astroconda IRAF under MacOS 10.15+, which no longer supports running the necessary 32-bit binaries natively. This comes with Anaconda 2019.10, Gemini IRAF 1.14, DRAGONS 2.1.0 and other packages from Astroconda pre-installed. Users of MacOS 10.14 affected by the Tk bug that causes a desktop session logout when displaying graphics may also want to install this guest distribution as a workaround.

April 2021 GeMS/GSAOI run cancelled

March 16th, 2021

The cases of COVID-19 have continued to grow in the Coquimbo region, in particular in La Serena, Coquimbo and Vicuña. After careful consideration of the pandemic situation in the Coquimbo region and to safeguard the health of the observatory staff, the April 2021 GeMS/GSAOI run has been cancelled. We hope that observations later in the semester will be possible.

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