Fundación Galileo Galilei - INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo 28°45'14.4N 17°53'20.6W 2387.2m A.S.L.

The OPTICON call for Transnational Access in Semester 2019B is OPEN and will close on 28 February 2019

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We are pleased to announce that the call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. See http://www.astro-opticon.org/h2020/tna/call/call-2019b.html.

The call will close on 28 February 2019 at 23.59 UT exactly.

Note that technical support for the submission software is not provided out-of-hours and late applications will not be accepted, so please complete your application in plenty of time. In recent semesters OPTICON have received between 45-55 proposals and allocated about 15 projects per semester.

Following the mid-term review of the Horizon 2020 contract, OPTICON restates the policy to support proposals based primarily on scientific merit, taking into account that due regard should be given to user groups composed of users who have not previously used the installation and are working in countries where no equivalent research infrastructure exist.

Applicants are invited to review the web-page notes carefully, even if they have used the TNA programme before. Please use the 2019A updated template for the scientific case and do not change the font sizes or page margins to squeeze more words in.
Proposals using the wrong template, or which have been modified to use smaller fonts or narrow margins, will be disadvantaged at the TAC meeting.

Also read carefully the "Overrides" and "Targets of Opportunity" definitions and policies.

Please check your proposal is compliant with the nationality rules and that you have no national access via bi-lateral time swaps as this will disqualify your application before it is reviewed. E.g., Italian PIs can not request observing time at the NOT since a TNG-NOT sharing-time agreement is in force.

The Telescopio Nazionale Galileo offers 10 nights from November 1st, 2019 to March 31st, 2020. October nights are not available for technical reasons.

Note that the monitoring mode is subjected to severe limitations. The schedule is dominated by long blocks of full-nights belonging to GTO and Italian Large Programs. Queing mode is not offered at all. Service time is scheduled on fixed nights so, e.g., seeing requirements do not apply. Objects included in the TNG Protected Target List cannot be requested.

Moreover, the GIARPS configuration (simultaneous use of HARPS-N and GIANO) is offered in a shared risk mode. Applicants must provide a backup program with one instrument only (HARPS-N or GIANO-B) in case the GIARPS configuration is not available. Finally, a Long-Term program on the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events is already running at TNG. Therefore, proposals on this topic will not be accepted anymore.