Announcement of NSF/MSIP-funded open-access to Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network
Starting in 2017, U.S. community open-access time was made available on the LCO global telescope network through a NOIRLab time allocation process. Specific goals for the use of this open-access time are (a) to effectively follow up on current time domain surveys, especially those with public distribution of data and alerts, and (b) to help the community prepare for time domain research in the Rubin-LSST era by developing relevant programs, methods, and technologies.
The LCO network comprises thirteen 1-m and two 2-m optical telescopes, optimized for time-domain studies, and operated as a single observatory.
There are 2-m telescopes in Australia and Hawaii, and 1-m telescopes in Texas, Tenerife, Israel, Chile, Australia, and South Africa. Additional 1-m telescopes are planned for China.
The 2-m telescopes are instrumented with 10 arcmin field-of-view imagers (single channel in Australia and 4-channel in Hawaii) and R=500 spectrographs. The 1-m telescopes are instrumented with 26 arcmin field-of-view imagers (except for Israel). A set of fiber-coupled, R=50,000 spectrographs are available at four 1-m sites (Texas, Israel, South Africa, and Chile). Telescopes and instruments run robotically.
Observation requests are submitted at any time through a web form or a programmatic API. Requests may be single observations, sequences with a given cadence, or rapid-response (<15 minutes from now). A scheduler dynamically assigns observations to telescopes.
Data are pipeline processed to remove instrumental signature and may be downloaded from an archive, through a web form or a programmatic API in as little as 15 minutes after the shutter closes. After 12 months, proprietary data becomes public.
Additional, detailed information about sites, telescopes, and instrument capabilities and performance is available on the LCO website (lco.global). The website also has links to tools for planning or requesting observations.
Additional details about the open-access program can be found here.