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 2019A is OPEN and will close on September 2nd 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-2019a.html.

The call will close on 2 September at 23.59 UT exactly.

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 OPTICON received between 50-60 proposals and allocated about 15 projects per semester.

Please review the web-page notes carefully. Note that there is a new latex template with fewer sections than the old version. Also note that OPTICON management is discouraging ToO proposals for Gravitational Wave overides. There is a justification for this in the report from the previous OPTICON TAC meeting which can be downloaded from the link http://www.astro-opticon.org/h2020/tna/index.html

Please check your proposal is compliant with the nationality rules and that you have no national access via bi-lateral time swaps as this will disqualify your application before it is reviewed. E.g., Italian PIs can not request observing time at the NOT since a TNG-NOT sharing-time agreement is in force.

The Telescopio Nazionale Galileo offers 10 nights from April 1st, 2019 to September 30th, 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. Objects included in the TNG Protected Target List cannot be requested.

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. Finally, a Long-Term program on the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events is already running at TNG. Therefore, proposals on this topic will not be accepted anymore.