Announcement: Kitt Peak National Observatory

7 December 2020: Following is an update on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on NSF’s NOIRLab. Starting in mid-October 2020, science operations conducted with limited staff were re-established at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona and at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Gemini South, and SOAR facilities in Chile after their suspension on 18 March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, since mid-May 2020, the Gemini North telescope has been conducting observations from Maunakea. At KPNO, the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope and WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope, as well as a number of tenant facilities, have restarted limited nighttime operations. The focus has been on continuity of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and NEID instrument commissioning. We are currently able to continue science operations at KPNO while following all public health guidelines and our rigorous safety protocols developed over the past eight months, and are closely monitoring the …

20 October 2020: On Monday 19 October 2020 the ninth edition of Viaje al Universo, one of the main Education and Outreach programs hosted by NOIRLab in Chile, began. Its goal is to share the wonders of the Universe, the excitement of astronomy, and the latest technological advances at NOIRLab’s facilities with students and families in Chile and other Spanish-speaking audiences. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s Viaje al Universo has been converted to a virtual program. The program includes talks on astronomical topics, the operation of telescopes, solar observations, and observations of the Moon and planets. We will also have a career panel with observatory professionals who will talk about the next generation of big telescopes. On the opening day, the winner of the National Prize for Exact Sciences and Director of AURA in Chile, Dr. Mario Hamuy, gave a talk titled El Sol Negro (The Black Sun in English) in …

7 October 2020: We are continuously monitoring and actively responding to the COVID-19 situation, including taking measures to ensure the safety of our staff, their families and our communities. Our top operational priority at all sites has been the restart and continuity of science operations. A recent update on progress towards restarting science operations can be found on our COVID-19 web page. We have assessed the possibility of reopening our sites in Arizona, Hawai‘i and Chile for public visits, but after careful consideration we have concluded the sites will need to remain closed to public visits until at least 1 February 2021. This includes public visits to the Kitt Peak Visitor Center — and the public access to the Kitt Peak site via the mountain road — as well as public visits to our facilities in Hawai‘i (Gemini North) and Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile (CTIO and Gemini South). With COVID-19 …

2 September 2020: After receiving its new short name, NSF’s NOIRLab, earlier in 2020, a targeted effort was started to move NOIRlab’s public Internet presence from the interim website at nationalastro.org to a new domain at noirlab.edu. This public site has now been launched and is the main web portal for the public and media. The new website offers a complete archive of all NOIRLab information for the public and media — more than 5000 images with rich contextual metadata, hundreds of videos, news, print products, fulldome sequences for planetariums to download and show in their domes, and more. The assets are freely available for download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The site also offers a historical perspective through the archives of newsletters from NOAO and Gemini. The website is bilingual in English and Spanish. Each of NOIRLab’s five Programs, the international Gemini Observatory, Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo …

21 August 2020: On Tuesday 25 August, astronomers will release the final report from the Satellite Constellations 1 workshop during a virtual press conference hosted by the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and the American Astronomical Society (AAS). The briefing, to be conducted via Zoom, will begin at 2:00 pm US Eastern Daylight Time (18:00 UTC) and last 1 hour. Registration instructions appear below. When SpaceX began launching clusters of 60 Starlink satellites in May 2019, astronomers reacted with alarm. Not only are the Starlink satellites brighter than anyone expected, but there could be tens of thousands more like them as companies in the rapidly growing commercial space industry strive to provide satellite-based communication services to underserved and remote areas. Constellations of bright satellites in low Earth orbit will fundamentally change ground-based optical and infrared astronomy and could impact the appearance of the night sky for stargazers worldwide. SATCON1 gathered more than 250 astronomers, …

23 June 2020: The inaugural edition of The NOIRLab Mirror is now available. Our new, twice-yearly newsletter with information focusing on NOIRLab’s user communities showcases the science, technology, and program developments across the five NOIRLab Programs: Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Gemini Observatory, Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory Operations. The inaugural issue also features the perspectives of five distinguished scientists on the roles of a national observatory. “The choice of ‘The Mirror’ for the name of this newsletter series is more than a reflection of the central role of optics in our field,” writes NOIRLab Director Pat McCarthy in the first issue. “A mirror allows us to see ourselves as others do. As we launch NOIRLab and this newsletter series, it is important that we be aware of how you see us in the present, how you understand the aspirations of our …

11 June 2020: Following is an update on the impact of the COVID-19 virus on NSF’s NOIRLab. Since the night of Tuesday, 19 May 2020, the Gemini North telescope has been conducting observations from Maunakea. Operations continue at the Gemini North Base facility with minimal daytime and nighttime staffing. NOIRLab is developing site-specific plans to restart mountain- and base-operations across all other NOIRLab locations. Our sites in Chile and Arizona remain closed. In these unprecedented circumstances, our first priority remains the health and safety of our staff, visitors and other users of the mountains. The timing of the restarts will differ for each location and will reflect national and regional regulations, including those of the Tohono O’odham Nation at Kitt Peak, and our procedures will comply with local safety guidelines. Even as many US states and countries worldwide begin to reopen, conditions in Arizona and Chile do not meet any of the metrics …

9 June 2020: #ShutDownSTEM, Wednesday 10 June 2020, is a day of international protest of systemic racism in research and academia. STEM and research professionals are asked to stop their normal activities of research, teaching and meetings for one day, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and others. The organizers call for a halt to “business as usual” to accommodate conversations, learning and reflection on systemic racism in research and academia and to create a plan of action for the future. Details about the #ShutDownSTEM movement can be found on their website. We at NOIRLab acknowledge historical inequality, including the underrepresentation of African Americans in astronomy and we do not condone any form of racial discrimination. We have encouraged all staff to consider participating in learning and discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion on 10 June. Staff may desire to be actively engaged, or to use the day for personal …

1 June 2020: The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Nicholas U. Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, has passed a major milestone en route to mapping tens of millions of galaxies in its quest to understand the nature of dark energy and its role in the expansion history of the Universe. DESI was designed and built by an international collaboration of about 500 researchers at 75 institutions in 13 nations. DESI can observe up to 5000 galaxies at a time, using optical fibers that feed the light from each galaxy into an array of spectrographs. There the light is spread into individual rainbows which will enable the team to create a three-dimensional map of the Universe. When it became clear in March that KPNO would be closed owing to COVID-19, the team moved quickly to obtain preliminary data, which enabled them to reach its …

1 June 2020: A project started ten years ago by NSF’s NOIRLab Director Patrick McCarthy, then an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and fellow Carnegie scientist Daniel Kelson, has come to fruition this month with the results of theCarnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) Redshift Survey being published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Universe is filled with galaxies like the one we live in, the Milky Way. Spread out across the sky, their distribution is not random — galaxies are instead laid out in patterns, groupings, and correlations known as large-scale structure. The goal of the CSI Redshift Survey was to understand how this structure affects the growth and evolution of galaxies. To study this, the team needed to collect many data points, including distances, luminosities, colors and — most importantly — mass, for half a million galaxies. Back in 2003, before embarking on this survey, McCarthy was involved in …

20 November 2019: In early November, the GEMMA (Gemini in the Era of Multi-Messenger Astronomy) project brought together science communications professionals to explore the unique opportunities and challenges of communicating Multi-Messenger and Time-Domain Astronomy, two rapidly growing fields in astronomy. Funded by the US National Science Foundation, this communications summit hosted more than 30 participants for two days at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, an AURA-managed facility. Until the mid-20th century, our view of the Universe was limited almost entirely to the narrow band of light that could penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and was visible either to our eyes or to sensitive photographic plates loaded at the focus of increasingly large telescopes. The first major expansion of our view came with the development of radio astronomy, leading to the realization that the Universe could look very different when seen through different “eyes” tuned to a different type of radiation. …