2023 Gemini Science Observations

This animation from the US National Gemini Office (US NGO) shows every science observation made by the Gemini North and South telescopes in 2023. The observations, which targeted 1829 unique objects with 33,060 science frames taken, appear on the map chronologically and are color-coded by telescope (blue for Gemini North and red for Gemini South). The public metadata was gathered from the Gemini Observatory Archive and shows the uniqueness of the Gemini twin telescopes, covering essentially the entire night sky from their locations in Chile and Hawai‘i. Gemini North was offline for the first six months of 2023, while the primary mirror was repaired and recoated. Both Gemini North and Gemini South were also offline for two months due to the cybersecurity incident.

Science data were acquired by at least one Gemini telescope on 286 nights (78%). Notable gaps are due to the mirror incident at Gemini North (first semester), due to the cyber security incident at NOIRLab, and the scheduled shutdown at Gemini South in the second semester. The figure below shows a breakdown of science observations in 2023. The majority of the on-target science time (78.6%) was spent observing the regular queue (Q), with Fast Turnaround (FT), Large and Long Programs (LP), and System Verification (SV) time combined for 18% of the time. The remaining programs were Director's Discretionary (DD) and Calibration (CAL). Most of the science data were acquired with GMOS-N/S (65% of the time, or 663 hours), followed by GHOST and the Near-IR instruments. For the two speckle imaging instruments, `Alopeke and Zorro, each frame counted by the Gemini Observatory Archive is a cube with one thousand or more images, so the real number of frames and exposure time are higher by at least a factor of 1000. The side panels show the RA and DEC distributions of the science targets. The coverage for right ascension is mostly complete, and there is a substantial overlap in declination close to the celestial equator.