This time we report on the success of the shutdown in October, give an update on the NIR
instrument and the slitmask IFU, and show some the of testing the new PG0700 grating.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Hope everyone stays safe and healthy!
[SALT eNews] Konkurs wniosków obserwacyjnych na semestr 2022-1
Oto oryginalna wiadomość:
Dear colleagues,
We are now accepting SALT Phase 1 proposals for the period 1 May 2022 - 31 October 2022 (2022 Semester 1).
The Phase 1 proposal deadline is Friday, 28 January 2021, at 18:00 SAST (corresponding to 16:00 UTC).
This proposal call is for SALTICAM, RSS and HRS. All details of the status of specific instrument modes are available in the Call for Proposals linked below, including changes from previous semesters. Note that a new grating for RSS, PG0700, will be commissioned over the next few months, and is available on a shared risk basis in the next semester.
Please submit your proposal via the SALT Principal Investigator Proposal Tool (PIPT). You may continue to use v5.5 unless you intend to use the new grating, in which case please update to the latest version available on the website. Instructions, software, and other information about proposing for SALT can be found on the SALT website. Note also that the web manager will ask for some user statistics, which the SAAO is now required to capture for reporting purposes.
As mentioned in our Call for Proposals and, more recently, in our August SALT Newsletter, SALT is having a short shutdown in October. The main purpose of the shutdown, together with a description of the various tasks, was discussed in an article in the newsletter
(https://www.salt.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/salt_newsletter_202109.pdf). As an update, we can now confirm that the RSS optics replacement will not
happen during this shutdown.
We have now finalised the dates as follows:
10th October - last observing night.
11th October - shutdown begins.
~18th October - on sky re-commissioning and beginning of observations with HRS and SALTICAM ONLY.
~26th October - RSS on-sky re-commissioning.
~29th October - normal operations.
Please note that these dates may shift slightly, depending on how things go.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact us (salthelp@salt.ac.za)
if you have any questions.
Regards,
Encarni
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Dr. Encarni Romero Colmenero
Head of SALT Astronomy Operations erc@salt.ac.za
2021-08-30
[SALT eNews] Biuletyn SALT Wrzesień 2021
Oto oryginalna wiadomość:
Dear SALT community,
Please find attached our September issue of the SALT Newsletter. Among others, we report on progress with the RSS Big 5, the NIR instrument and the decision to obtain a laser frequency comb for the HRS. Our new FP postdoc reports on refurbishment plan for the LR and MR Fabry–Pérot etalons. And we look for volunteers to beta-test the new Web Manager.
We wish you all well during this challenging time of COVID-19. Hope everyone stays safe and healthy!
Before the meeting, we would like to invite you to think expansively about this concept that is being explored, by which SALT could be augmented and used to provide spectroscopic observations of thousands of additional targets per year, even while executing its normal observing queue...
The idea is to employ multiple “mini-trackers” (MTs) to take advantage of SALT's spherical primary mirror's enormous (35 degree diameter) uncorrected field of view. These deployable devices, each with patrol fields of 100 square degrees, would be able to range around the focal sphere to access additional targets while conventional SALT observations are made with the main tracker. A suite of up to four MTs would therefore effectively serve as a set of individual four-to-six-metre mini-SALTs, each equipped with a low-resolution spectrograph that would likely be fibre-fed. These "telescopes" would be additionally constrained in terms of their track times and the fields they can access due to their dependence on the main tracker, but the simpler spherical aberration corrector optics would increase their throughput.
The main MT science case centres on transient follow-up for the Rubin Observatory and broader time-domain science. However, we need to be aware of other potential opportunities that may exist and we would particularly like to get a sense of the sorts of targets (total number, sky density, brightness range) that other science areas may provide for the MTs. An ideal project would include a vast pool of targets brighter than 21st magnitude distributed all over the sky, though only a small fraction of the total pool could be expected to be observed. Repeat visits would also be quite unlikely with the MTs, since their patrol fields would be governed by the main tracker observing the normal SALT queue.
Please see the attached PDFs for additional information and feel free to share this message with your networks as you consider the various kinds of science that might be pursued with such a system.
If you have any specific questions before the meeting, please feel free to contact us via salthelp.
We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday 13 July!
Kind regards
The SALT Team
2021-06-23
[SALT eNews] Konkurs wniosków obserwacyjnych na semestr 2021-2
Oto oryginalna wiadomość:
Dear Colleagues,
We are now accepting SALT Phase 1 proposals for the period 1 November 2021 - 30 April 2022 (2021 Semester 2).
The Phase 1 proposal deadline is Friday, 30 July 2021, at 18:00 SAST (corresponding to 16:00 UTC).
This proposal call is for SALTICAM, RSS and HRS. All details of the status of specific instrument modes are available in the Call for Proposals link below, including changes from previous semesters.
Please submit your proposal via the SALT Principal Investigator Proposal Tool (PIPT). Instructions, software, and other information about proposing for SALT can be found on the SALT website.
