Urgent Call for Semester 21A

This is a call for urgent proposals. For regular calls for proposals, please see the facility home page.

Semester Information

Semester start of observing 2021-02-02 00:00 UT
Semester end of observing 2021-08-02 00:00 UT

The East Asian Observatory invites requests for urgent observing at any time with Principal Investigators (PIs) from its partner regions (Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand or Vietnam, or from eligible PIs in the UK/Ireland. All prospective PIs should review the JCMT eligibility requirements page prior to the preparation and submission of a proposal.

Urgent Requests should clearly describe the following:

  1. The urgency for the observations, and why a response to the regular, semi-annual call for proposals is/was inappropriate.
  2. The time span over which observations may be made or the specific times at which they must be made.
  3. The timescale for analysis of resulting data and for publication thereof, which ought to be proportionately urgent.

The above information should appear in the Scientific Justification section of the proposal, as itemized above.

If approved, proposals will be graded with respect to the approved projects in the current semester and executed via the JCMT’s flexible observing scheme.

Available Instruments

Content of Proposal

Proposal authors are expected to provide separately both a Scientific and a Technical Justification for their proposed observations. These justifications should be substantiated by results from the JCMT integration time calculators to show that the proposed observations will reach the necessary noise limits for the proposed science goals. The calculators are integrated into the proposal submission system, and should be used to save the calculation(s) for their inclusion in the proposal.

Calibrations

Overheads for pointing, focusing, and calibrations should not be added to the time request. These activities will be accounted for separately. Calibration observations (e.g. focus, pointing, flux calibrators) and other unavoidable overheads (e.g. receiver tuning) are not charged to science projects and instead are charged to an Observatory accounting code. There is therefore no need for applicants to provide calibration overhead estimates in their proposals. The Observatory will perform regular and appropriate calibration observations to ensure that all science data obtained are sensibly calibrated.

If a proposal demands more unusual or more frequent calibrations then this needs to be clearly stated in the proposal and the time for these calibrations requested explicitly. For queries about what the default calibrations might be, or what extra overheads are generated by a project’s calibration requirements, please consult JCMT staff.

Previous Proposals

The proposers should provide information on any previous successful (or otherwise) JCMT proposals, including any papers published as a result or the status of the project. The success of previous projects can be taken into account when awarding time, so it is in the proposers’ interests to provide full information on this. A section is included within the proposal submission system for this information.

Data Available from the Archive and Large Programs

All proposers are expected to check that there are no preexisting public data that meet the proposal’s science needs, or conflicting large programs, before submitting a proposal. A clash tool is available to aid in this, which can be used to search for potential “clashes” between the proposed objects and available data sets. It also provides a link to an archive search for each target position.

It is the proposers’ responsibility to ensure that sufficient explanation is included as to why any matching data does not meet the project’s needs — e.g. because it does not reach sufficient depth, or because is not at the right frequency, or because the observations were not of sufficient quality.

The ‘Outreach’ version of the proposed science

In the ‘Public Summary’ section, proposers should provide a paragraph describing the goals of the proposal in a way that is understandable to a general (non-scientific) audience. This may be used in JCMT outreach efforts.

Flexible Scheduling

The overall philosophy of observing at JCMT is to match observing programs to the weather — see the Flexible Observing Guidelines page for more information. Data may then be acquired for a project at any time, even without the applicants being in attendance at the telescope. A summary was also given at the January 2015 Workshops.

Further Questions

For any remaining further questions, please use the “Contact us” link at the bottom of any page of the proposal submission system.