Gemini North and South Observing Databases Accessible; DD and PW Proposals now Accepted for GN

We're pleased to announce that the Gemini North and South observing databases (ODB) are now accessible to all Principal Investigators (PIs).

Numerous observations are waiting to be reviewed/checked and readied, and our contact scientists will now resume this process. If you have active programs for the semester and wish to make any changes, you can now do so. At present the Gemini guide star catalog servers are not accessible from the Observing Tool (OT), so you cannot specify a guide star if you had not already done so for your observations. We will define a guide star at the time of observation, so please ignore the warning. 

We are now accepting both Rapid and Standard Targets of Opportunity (ToOs) at Gemini North. PIs can once again trigger ToO observations via the OT and URL method. We will resume ToOs at Gemini South after the completion of the primary mirror coating and engineering shutdown in mid-November.

We are also accepting Director’s Discretionary time (DD) and Poor Weather (PW) proposals for Gemini North. You can download the Phase 1 (proposal) tool from the Phase I Tool page.

The DRAGONS and Gemini IRAF data reduction conda packages are now available from Gemini directly.

With the Gemini conda channel unavailable, the packages needed to install DRAGONS and Gemini IRAF must be downloaded manually to the local machine. Then, after applying a couple of configurations, the installation should proceed in an almost normal way.

The instructions and the data to download are available at the following Google Drive locations:

• MacIntel
• MacM1/M2
• Linux

Also note that the data packages needed to run the various DRAGONS tutorials are also affected by the systems being down. We have made all the data packages available here.