NOAO Community Workshops on DECam and BigBOSS

As previously announced via email, NOAO is hosting community workshops on DECam and BigBOSS, instruments that are coming to the Blanco and Mayall 4-m telescopes as part of their respective Large Survey Programs.

The first workshop (18-19 August 2011) focuses on DECam, a high-performance prime-focus imager for the Blanco telescope at CTIO. It is being built as part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Project by the DES Consortium, a Fermilab-led collaboration of scientists from institutions in the US, UK, Spain and Brazil. A facility instrument, DECam will be available to the NOAO community starting in early 2012.

The workshop provides an opportunity for interaction between the DECam collaboration and members of the NOAO community who are interested in using the instrument to further their science goals. The workshop discussions will give the DECam team an overview of the community interest in DECam, input that will be used in optimizing commissioning, operations and data reduction. The workshop is also an opportunity for prospective DECam users to meet and form collaborations based on their common or complementary interests.

Further details on the workshop are available at the DECam workshop homepage, where presentations from the meeting will be archived for the benefit of those unable to attend the workshop. Questions regarding the workshop may be directed to the organizing committee chair David James (djj@ctio.noao.edu).

Highly Multiplexed Spectroscopy with BigBOSS on the Mayall Telescope

The BigBOSS workshop will be held on 13-14 September 2011. As described in previous issues of Currents, BigBOSS is a highly-multiplexed, moderate resolution (R=5000) spectrograph with broad wavelength coverage (3800-10600A). It has the unique ability to provide simultaneous spectroscopic observations of up to 5000 targets spread over a three-degree diameter field of view. The instrument has been proposed for the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope by a large international collaboration that is led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and includes 16 US institutions (universities and national laboratories) as well as international partners.

In hosting the workshop, NOAO aims to understand the broader astrophysical impact of the proposed instrument and community aspirations for its use. The workshop will provide opportunities for the NOAO community to learn about the capabilities of the BigBOSS instrument; share their aspirations for the science they hope to do with it; and have an impact on the prioritization and preservation of instrument capabilities, observing modes and data pipeline deliverables. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for interested researchers to meet and form collaboration networks based on common interests in science projects with BigBOSS and to interact directly with members of the BigBOSS Collaboration.

For further details on the workshop, please see the BigBOSS workshop homepage, where presentations from the workshop will also be archived. Questions regarding the workshop may be directed to Arjun Dey (dey@noao.edu).