Available telescopes and instruments:
- Thirteen 1-meter telescopes, equipped with:
- Two 2-meter telescopes, equipped with:
- Ten Planewave DeltaRho 350 telescopes, equipped with
- QHY600 CMOS cameras.
For more information on LCO resources, check the links above or the links on the Observatory Information page.
Available hours:
There are two different appropriations of observing hours.
LCO's Open Access Program, sponsored by the Heising-Simons Foundation, is for the whole astronomical community. For this program, 80 hours are available on the 2-meter telescopes, 425 hours are available on the 1-meter telescopes, and 80 hours are available on the 0.4-meter telescopes in the 2025A semester. [Scientists affiliated with LCO's Science Collaboration institutions are also eligible to apply for Open Access time. The Science Collaboration partners have guaranteed time and conduct their own proposal selection processes.]
Beyond the Open Access Program, network time is available for members of LCO's science family, as well as astronomers at institutions with which LCO has formal agreements, but without guarantees of Network time: the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and IPAC at Caltech. LCO's science family includes current LCO staff scientists, post-docs, and students, Time Allocation Committee members (for 2 years), Science Advisory Committee members (for 2 years), former LCO graduate students (for 3 years), and former LCO postdocs (for 5 years). In the 2025A semester, we estimate that approximately 50, 1000, and 1000 hours will be available on the 2m, 1m, and 0.4m telescopes, respectively.
When submitting a proposal, authors should check the box indicating the appropriation for which they are eligible: either "Open Access", "LCO", or both.
Proposal Format:
The proposal body must conform to the following constraints:
- The Science and Technical Justification sections must not include an author list.
- Citations to publications should be numbered in sequential order in the proposal text. Later citations to the same publication should repeat the original number.
- The list of references (in number order), the report on past LCO use, and the list of related publications must begin on a separate page from the Justification sections.
- The font size must be 11 points or larger. (Caption fonts may be smaller.)
- Margins on all edges must be at least 1 inch.
- Line spacing must be no denser than 6 lines per inch.
- The file size must be under 10MB.
- The recommended length for all materials is 7 pages.
Additional Information
Proposals should be submitted to the LCO Observation Portal. Prospective authors must first create an account in the Portal.
For both appropriations (Open Access and LCO share), authors may request long-term status for their proposals. If a long-term proposal is ranked highly by the Time Allocation Committee, it may be awarded time for three consecutive semesters (2025A-2026A), at the discretion of the LCO director.
Proposals that compete directly with LCO Key Projects will be disqualified. Collaborative proposals that enhance the Key Projects will be considered. We recommend that authors of proposals for science programs that may overlap with Key Projects contact the Key Project PIs prior to writing/submitting their proposals.
The Guidelines for Writing Proposals page provides information on
- registering in the Observatory portal,
- the fields that must be included in the proposal,
- instrument overheads and our time-charging policy,
- special observing modes,
- the Target Visibility Calculator and Exposure Time Calculator.