Science Operations Announcements

Announcement of Opportunity for new Large and Long Programs

December 16th, 2019

Gemini Observatory announces an opportunity for New Large and Long Programs.  Eligible PIs are invited to propose scientific investigations to begin observation in 2020B semester. Letters of Intent are required to be submitted no later than February 4, 2020 with complete proposals due April 1, 2020.  Details on large programs, the proposal process, and specifics on the 2020 call for proposals are available on the Large and Long Program webpages. 

Observing databases offline Dec 3

November 29th, 2019

The Gemini observing databases will be offline for several hours on Tuesday, Dec 3 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 2020A Observing Tool will be available after the update and will be required to access the observing databases.

DRAGONS First Public Release!

October 31st, 2019

It is with great delight that we are announcing the first public release of Gemini's new Python-base data reduction platform, DRAGONS, Data Reduction for Astronomy from Gemini Observatory North and South. This project has been many years in the making. DRAGONS offers a more streamlined approached to the data reduction of Gemini data, compared to the Gemini IRAF package.

IMPORTANT: MacOS 10.14.6 and 10.15 incompatibilities with data reduction software

October 11th, 2019

As of this week's v10.15 release, MacOS is no longer capable of running the 32-bit Astroconda IRAF distribution needed by Gemini IRAF. For the time being, Gemini IRAF users on Apple machines are advised to continue using MacOS 10.14 or earlier, or to install Astroconda in a virtual machine with a compatible OS. Gemini will look into providing a ready-made VM image to help with this while we are migrating our data reduction tools to Python.

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