Fundación Galileo Galilei - INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo 28°45'14.4N 17°53'20.6W 2387.2m A.S.L.

The OPTICON call for Transnational Access in Semester 2018B is OPEN and will close on February 28th 2018

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We are pleased to announce that the call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. See http://www.astro-opticon.org/h2020/tna/call/call-2018b.html.

The call will close on 28 February at 23.59UT exactly.

Proposals must meet certain EU and OPTICON rules for formal eligibility concerning team membership. Please pay attention to those rules or your proposal may be rejected without any scientific evaluation.

The Telescopio Nazionale Galileo offers 10 nights from October 1st, 2018 to March 31, 2019. Note that the monitoring mode is subjected to severe limitations. The schedule is dominated by long blocks of full-nights belonging to GTO and Italian Large Programs. Queing mode is not offered at all. Service time is scheduled on fixed nights so, e.g., seeing requirements do not apply. Applicants must take into account the Protected Targets policy.

Moreover, the GIARPS configuration (simultaneous use of HARPS-N and GIANO) is offered in a shared risk mode. Applicants must provide a backup program with one instrument only (HARPS-N or GIANO-B) in case the GIARPS configuration is not available.

The Horizon 2020 contract has added two new robotic telescopes, a requirement to support time domain astronomy which is defined as a science category in its own right and some changes to the rules on applicant nationalities. We have also tried to define which facilities are best able to support various kinds of overrides, monitoring and time critical observations. Please review the web-page notes carefully, even if you have used the TNA programme before.

The semester is centred on September 2018 to February 2019, but there are small variations at some telescopes to accommodate their normal semesters and maximise scheduling flexibility. Note that technical support for the submission software is not provided out-of-hours and late applications will not be accepted, so please complete your application in plenty of time. In recent semesters we have received between 50-60 proposals and allocated about 15 projects per semester.