Science Operations Announcements

Gemini South observing database offline July 7

July 3rd, 2020

The Gemini South observing database will be offline for several hours on Tuesday, July 7, 2020 for maintenance. If you cannot connect then please try again in a few hours.

This should not affect access to the Gemini North database, though users of the OT may see some connectivity warnings.

Update: As of 14:00 Chilean time on July 7, 2020 the Gemini South observing database is back online. Please submit a Helpdesk ticket if you encounter any problems.

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Gemini South 20B Phase II deadline delayed until August 20

July 3rd, 2020

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.

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2020B programs and schedule announced

June 25th, 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.

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2020B Observing Tool Available

June 3rd, 2020

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.

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Observing databases offline June 2

June 1st, 2020

The Gemini observing databases will be offline for several hours on Tuesday, June 2 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 2020B Observing Tool will be available after the update and will be required to access the observing databases.

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Virtual machine image for running IRAF under recent MacOS releases

May 19th, 2020

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.

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DRAGONS v2.1.1 - Bug Fix Release Available

April 20th, 2020

We announce the availability of a DRAGONS v2.1.1, a bug fix release.

DRAGONS, Data Reduction for Astronomy from Gemini Observatory North and South, is Gemini's new Python-based data reduction platform. DRAGONS offers a more streamlined approach to the data reduction of Gemini data, compared to the Gemini IRAF package.

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New DRAGONS Patch Release

April 20th, 2020

A bug fix release of DRAGONS is now available. In release 2.1.1, we have fixed bugs and typos found by the users and ourselves since the initial release. We have also added compatibility with astropy v4. If you already have DRAGONS installed, you can update by doing conda install dragons=2.1.1. If you need to install DRAGONS for the first time, please see the Download and Installation Instructions.