The Optical Infrared Coordination Network for Astronomy (OPTICON) has issued its call for proposals for semester 2018B. Here is the full text of the call:
Ladies and Gentlemen
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-2018b.html
The call will close on 28 February at 23.59UT exactly.
The Horizon 2020 contract has added two new robotic telescopes, a requirement to support time domain astronomy which is defined as a science category in its own right and some changes to the rules on applicant nationalities. We have also tried to define which facilities are best able to support various kinds of overrides, monitoring and time critical observations. Please review the web-page notes carefully, even if you have used the TNA programme before.
The semester is centred on Sept 2018 to Feb 2019, but there are small variations at some telescopes to accommodate their normal semesters and maximise scheduling flexibility. 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 we have received between 50-60 proposals and allocated about 15 projects per semester.
Good Luck
John Davies
OPTICON Project Scientist
