CIAO
Kyoto3DII

On the decommissioning of CIAO+AO36 use

As you might know, from S04B, CIAO has been maintained and supported by the current instrument/operation team (Ishii, Suto, Tamura) and opened to the community as a "semi-PI type instrument" with some support from the Hawaii Observatory, so that the users can use CIAO under the almost same condition as that for the other open use instruments. I hope these have been a benefit to you all. It is also noted that all the maintenance cost has been covered by the project office of the instrument team, and the operation of AO36 has been also on some voluntary base by AO team member in some cases.

However, it is now announced by the Observatory that from S08B the AO36 is decommissioned and its use is no longer available. Resultantly, the use of the combination of CIAO+AO36 becomes unavailable. CIAO is, however, available without AO36, as a PI instrument.

In fact S08B is a transition phase; AO188+IRCS is expected to be risk-shared and probably for some limited time. From S09A, the next generation coronagraph, HiCIAO+AO188, will be available as a PI type instrument.

Therefore, if you plan to use CIAO without AO36 in S08B (probably only in polarimetry mode), please contact Tamura or Ishii. Only S08B information is fine for the purpose in this time.

We'd like to thank all the users who have produced excellent sciences with CIAO/AO36 so far.

Best regards,
Motohide Tamura
PI of the CIAO instrument team