Monitoring proposals

Starting from S18B, Subaru Telescope offers monitoring proposals, which are executed in shared-risk mode. A monitoring proposal is defined as a proposal whose scientific goal requires more than one observing block in the time domain. Monitoring proposals can be submitted as either Normal or Intensive programs. The following requirements and remarks apply:

Requirements. Monitoring programs for the HSC queue mode must satisfy the following conditions:

  1. PI contacts HSC queue working group (QWG; queue@naoj.org) to confirm the technical feasibility before the proposal submission.
  2. Time windows for all observing sequences are defined in observing blocks (OBs) at Phase 2.
  3. The duration of each time window is sufficiently large.
  4. None of the observing sequences occupies a significant fraction of a night.
  5. Observing constraints such as seeing and transparency are not too strict.
  6. Only broad-band filters are used.
  7. PI has a tolerance for missing data in cadence due to various reasons such as bad weather, telescope/instrument trouble, filter availability, and necessity to observe other highly ranked proposals).
  8. All observing blocks have to be independent, i.e., order of execution of OBs cannot be specified.

Remarks:

  1. Requirements 3, 4, 5, and 7 are subjective, as the program feasibility depends significantly on the nature of the requested monitoring plan. PIs should contact QWG for details.
  2. We will not change filter for the sole reason of executing monitoring OBs. We will execute OBs of monitoring proposals when seeing, transparency, and filter all meet the request.
  3. As a general rule, execution of HSC queue-mode programs is based on the TAC score and observing constraints. Therefore, if there are proposals with higher TAC scores than a monitoring program, we may choose to execute those instead.
  4. If a monitoring proposal is accepted as Grade B, it is likely to lead to significant observing gaps. Note that the completion rate of Grade B programs is on average about 50%. Even Grade A programs can miss some data due to the factors described above.
  5. Quality assessment will be carried out for each OB, not for the entire time series.
  6. OBs of accepted monitoring programs can be executed during classical SSP nights as well as queue nights.
  7. More general cadence observations for which the time windows are determined once the first OB is executed cannot be accepted. We only accept monitoring proposals for which all time windows can be defined at Phase 2.