While the Gemini-S telescope has been closed during recent months, our team has been working on preparing detailed plans for re-opening, as soon as the conditions in Chile would allow.

A decision has been taken that from September 28th we can start work on preparing the Gemini-S telescope for limited night-time operation. Assuming that all the preparations will go well, we may be back to observing at night by the second half of October.

Gemini is now accepting proposals for observing time in Semester 2021A. The submission deadline varies with participant. A new version of the Phase I Tool (PIT) has been released to support proposal submissions.

Poor Weather proposals are now being accepted at Gemini North using the 2020B PIT.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Gemini South telescope is currently not observing. This situation is likely to continue for some time to come. Therefore we have decided that the Phase-2 preparation deadline for Gemini South 2020B programs can be delayed by one month until August 20, 2020. 

The Gemini North Phase-2 deadline remains July 20, 2020.

Gemini 2020B observing programs and schedule have been announced. Notification emails were sent to successful PIs on June 25, 2020. Please check the schedules page for more information. Note that the latest version of the Observing Tool is required to access and update 2020B programs.

The 2020B Gemini Observing Tool is now available for download. This update is required to access the Gemini Observing Databases.

The Installation Instructions are linked on the Observing Tool web page, and we recommend that everyone download their programs from the databases rather than import from saved XMLs.

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.