News

Last week the LCOGT Science Advisory Committee met, and, among other activities, reviewed the key project proposals. There were 11 proposals, and the total amount of time requested was more than 17,000 hours on the 1m network and about 1700 hours on the 2m network. Although the pool for key project proposals is about 6000 1m hours and 1200 2m hours, I wanted to allocate no more than half of these hours in the first call. This limitation is (1) so that we can have at least one more call next year and allow additional programs to start, and (2) so that we can lower the overallocation, with the goal of executing nearly all of the requested observations.

I am pleased to announce that the following programs have received LCOGT network time. The numbers listed are the LCOGT time. All of these projects will receive additional time on the network from other science collaboration partners.

In addition, the project Transiting Exoplanet Characterization Key Project (PI: Daniel Bayliss, Australian National University) received a small allocation in 2014 to carry out a pilot study that would demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed project.

As can be seen, it was difficult to limit the allocation to the desired level. Totals of 3452 hours (1m) and 780 hours (2m) were allocated in 2014.

These project teams are large with good representation by much of the science collaboration. I did not have room in the table to list the Co-I's, but here they are:

Echo Mapping of AGN Accretion Flows (Horne, PI):

Aaron Barth (UC Irvine), Todd Boroson (LCOGT), David Sand (Texas Tech), Tomasso Treu (UCSB), Christopher Onken (ANU), Anna Pancoast (UCSB), Encarni Romero Colmenero (SALT), Stefano Valenti (LCOGT), Carolin Villforth (St Andrews), Hartmut Winkler (Johannesburg).

The Next Generation Sample of Supernovae (Howell, PI):

Iair Arcavi (1,2), Charles Baltay (17), Bruce Bassett (9,10), Yi Cao (18), Michael Childress (8), Alexander Conley (7), Steve Crawford (9), Nan Ellman (17), Guojie Feng (12), Avishay Gal-Yam (19), Ariel Goobar (20), Melissa Graham (3), Eric Hsiao (21), Eli Kasai (9,10), Mansi Kasliwal (21), Emily Levesque (7), Roy Maartens (11,26), Howie Marion (5), Ryan McKinnon (17), Dae-Sik Moon (27), Hubiao Niu (12), Peter Nugent (22,3), Eran Ofek (18), Mark Phillips (21), Robert Quimby (23), David Rabinowitz (17), David Sand (4), Richard Scalzo (8), Brian Schmidt (8), Jeffrey Silverman (5), Jesper Sollerman (20), Stephen Smartt (24), Matthew Smith (11), Mark Sullivan (25), Abiy Tekola (9,1), Stefano Valenti (1,2), Jozsef Vinko (6), Emma Walker (17), Lifan Wang (13,14,15), Xiaofeng Wang (16), J. Craig Wheeler (5), Fang Yuan (8)

Affiliations: (1) Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, (2) University of California, Santa Barbara, (3) University of California, Berkeley, (4) Texas Tech University, (5) University of Texas, Austin, (6) University of Szeged, (7) University of Colorado, Boulder, (8) Australian National University, (9) South African Astronomical Observatory, (10) University of Cape Town, (11) University of the Western Cape, (12) Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, (13) Texas A&M University, (14) Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy, (15) Purple Mountain Observatory, (16) Tsinghua University, (17) Yale University, (18) California Institute of Technology, (19) Weizmann Institute for Science, (20) Stockholm University, (21) Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, (22) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (23) Kavli IMPU, (24) Queens University, Belfast, (25) University of Southampton, (26) University of Portsmouth, (27) University of Toronto

Exploring Cool Planets Beyond the Snowline (Street, PI):

Yiannis Tsapras (LCOGT/Queen Marys University of London), Keith Horne (University of St. Andrews), Martin Dominik (University of St. Andrews), Markus Hundertmark (University of St. Andrews), Colin Snodgrass (ESO), Dan Bramich (QEERI), Roberto Figuera Jaimes (ESO), John Menzies (SAAO).

Members of the LCOGT Science Advisory Committee are Conny Aerts (Leuven U.), Lynne Hillenbrand (Caltech), Mark Phillips (Carnegie), Don Pollacco (Warwick U.), Abi Saha (NOAO), Dave Soderblom (STScI, chair), Nick Suntzeff (Texas A&M U.), and John Tonry (U. Hawaii).