Workshop: NEID – the New Precision Radial Velocity Spectrograph on WIYN

A state-of-the-art spectrograph dedicated to high-precision Doppler observations of exoplanets around nearby stars, NEID (NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy) will be commissioned on the WIYN 3.5m telescope in early 2019 and will be available for community use beginning in the 2019B semester. A session at the AAS meeting on 7 January 2019 will describe the status and science capabilities of NEID, its queue, pipeline, archive, and utilization policies, and the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership.

NOAO Mini-Workshop – “Resurgence of High-Resolution Spectroscopy at Gemini”: The US National Gemini Office (US NGO) will host a mini-workshop on Gemini high-resolution spectroscopy at the AAS meeting on 8 January 2019. The session will focus on the science opportunities made available by spectrographs spanning the optical to mid-infrared, including the visitor instruments GRACES, IGRINS, and Maroon-X, as well as the new facility optical spectrograph GHOST. Read more…

US ELT Program News and Activities: The US Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Program aims to provide the US community with open access to significant observing time on both the Thirty Meter Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope. On 7 January 2019 at the AAS Meeting, the Program will host a session on US ELT Program Science and a GMT & TMT Joint Open House. Read more…

Community members recently gathered in Tucson to develop and polish their TMT+GMT Key Science Program (KSP) concepts for submission in mid-December. Highlights of KSP development will be presented at the January AAS session on US ELT Program Science. Read more…

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to LEDs – Practical Solutions for Dark Sky Preservation in the LED Era: With communities around the world switching to light emitting diode (LED) fixtures for outdoor lighting, commonly-adopted white LEDs will increase sky glow by a factor of 2 to 4 over the widely-used high pressure sodium (HPS) standard. In this 7 January 2019 workshop, members of the AAS Committee on Light Pollution, Radio Interference, and Space Debris will share practical information you can use to advocate for dark-sky friendly LED solutions in your community. Read more…