La Silla: Important recent changes regarding Instrumentation and Facilities

Instruments and Facilities

  • NIRPS: The NIRPS LFC is not functional and at the moment we do not have an expected recovery date.
  • HARPS: The bluer LFC, covering the range 420nm-689nm is available.
  • The Visitor (Cassegrain) focus of the 3.6-m telescope is not offered due to the operation of NIRPS. The possibility of offering this visitor focus will be re-evaluated in the future.
  • The Visitor focus of the NTT continues to be available.
  • SOXS - the Son of X-Shooter is offered for observations this Period. SOXS operations are regulated by the NTT/SOXS Operation Policies.The installation and commissioning will continue.
  • EFOSC2 is not offered this Period, with plans to be decommissioned after SOXS enters stable operations.
  • ULTRACAM:
    • ULTRACAM is a high-speed imaging photometer designed to study faint astronomical objects at high temporal resolutions. ULTRACAM employs two dichroic beamsplitters and three frame-transfer CCD cameras to provide optical imaging with a field-of-view of 60 and at frame rates of up to 300 Hz simultaneously in the u'g'r', u'g'i' or u'g'z' bands.
    • This PI instrument is o ffered to the ESO community for observations at the NTT. Large Programmes will not be accepted.
    • Operation of this PI instrument requires the presence of the instrument team, so ULTRACAM programmes will preferentially be scheduled contiguously on periods of several nights. For questions on the instrument and observation strategies, users shall contact the instrument PI, Prof. Vik Dhillon (vik.dhillon[AT]sheffield.ac.uk), at least two weeks prior to submitting their proposal.
    • The ULTRACAM consortium is committed to support the PIs and observers from the ESO community that have been awarded telescope time with ULTRACAM. The ULTRACAM team will support the execution of the observations and the subsequent data reduction to allow the scienti c exploitation of the data obtained with ULTRACAM.
    • Proposers must check that their planned observations do not duplicate any protected targets speci fied for ULTRACAM in the Period 117 GTO target protection webpages.