Submitting your Magellan proposal
Instructions for Semester 2012B
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General Guidelines
- The AAO is using an online web form for
submission of Magellan proposals.
A Magellan proposal consists of the online Magellan
Proposal Form, which includes the upload of a Target List
and Scientific Justification as separate PDF documents.
Links to the submission form can be found at
the bottom of this page, and will
open a month or so before the deadline.
Please check that your name
and institution (and those of your collaborators) are in our pull-down lists in Question 1 of the form. If they're not, please email the
missing information (to ausgo -@- aao.gov.au) well before the deadline,
and we will add them for you to select. (Hint: You can search the lists by typing the first few letters of your search term over the opened list).
Browser compliance:
The Magellan proposal form has been successfully trialled using
Mozilla Firefox (v3), Safari (v4), and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.
Applicants are strongly advised to avoid using other browsers
or older versions of these ones.
Offline backups are the responsibility of the proposer:
Applicants are reminded that when they use the Save function they
should maintain a separate record of their proposal information offine.
The AAO takes all due care in providing the Save function but no
responsibility for the information held in proposal forms prior to submission.
Colour figures:
ATAC accepts colour figures as part of the PDF document outlining
your Scientific Justification.
Saving and viewing partially-completed proposals:
There are three buttons at the bottom of the online Magellan proposal
form. In all cases they send information to the email
address of the PI (Question 1). It is imperative that
this email address is entered before any of these
buttons are used. - Save: A URL linking to the
partially-completed form will be generated and emailed. By clicking
on this link, you will be returned to the partially-completed form.
Each time you 'Save', the information currently in the form is
written to the proposal AAO database as an unsubmitted proposal.
Note that although the link is privately emailed to the PI, it is publicly accessible
and so should not be divulged except to those with a direct need
to edit the proposal. PIs wishing to circulate copies of a draft proposal to
co-Is should instead use the Save & Review option.
- Save & Review: Clicking this button saves the current form
data and then generates a PDF document of the draft proposal, in the format seen by
ATAC. Use this mode for sharing a readable version of the proposal with
collaborators. The PDF is emailed to the PI.
- Submit: Clicking this button finalises
the information in the form and submits the proposal. The proposal is assigned a
unique proposal ID, a time stamp, and is emailed to the PI and to the
Australian Gemini Office. Submitted proposals cannot
be altered by the PI after this stage.
Successful proposal submissions:
The person listed as the Principal Contact will receive an e-mail acknowledgement
when the proposal has been received (normally within a few minutes
of submission). If you do not receive this acknowledgement,
or wish to check on any other aspect of your submission, please contact
the Australian Gemini Office, (ausgo -@- aao.gov.au).
If you notice a mistake after you have submitted:
If you realise after you've submitted the proposal that you have made a
mistake, please email the Australian Gemini Office, (ausgo -@- aao.gov.au), as soon as
possible to explain what is wrong. Don't resubmit the proposal.
We will send instructions on how to
replace an incorrect application. You must tell us about any errors
by the day after the deadline at the latest - we will start to process
all applications then, and any errors will not be corrected after this point.
Problems or questions:
Please be sure to read all of these instructions carefully,
and if you have any queries
or difficulties, please contact the Australian Gemini Office
(ausgo -@- aao.gov.au), well before the proposal deadline.
Getting started:
Read the notes below related to each question of the proposal form:
| Q1 | Q2 | Q3 |
Q4 | Q5 | Q6 |
Q7 | Q8 | Q9 |
To fill out and submit your electronic Magellan proposal form, follow
the link at the very bottom of this page.
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Question 1: Names and Institutions of Applicants
Select your name and institutional affiliation (and those of your co-investigators)
from the drop-down lists (Hint: You can search the lists by
typing the first few letters of your search term over the opened
list. This list contains only the names of all previous applicants for
Gemini or Magellan time).
If your name or institution are not in our
list, email the missing information to ausgo -@- aao.gov.au
and we
will add them for you to select. For this reason, we recommend that you check
the names and affilitations for your proposal against our lists well
in advance of the proposal deadline.
If you have a joint affiliation check the box and select your other
institution from the pop-up list.
Institutional affiliations must be listed for every applicant
for the purpose of time accounting.
If the applicant list includes a collaboration that goes under a collective
team name, list team members individually.
Space is also provided to indicate any PhD students and their
supervisors. Note that the Magellan Telescopes are operated in
a 100% "classical" mode where the visiting astronomer is physically
present and responsible for data acquisition. The operations staff do
not provide significant support to visiting astronomers at night, so
it is expected that observers will be experienced and
self-sufficient. PhD students will therefore need to be accompanied by
their supervisor, or someone at postdoc-level or above with the
necessary observational experience.
Question 2: Title and Abstract
Do not use special symbols or LaTeX commands in the title or
abstract -- these will be printed as written in the proposal when
generated.
Question 3: Scheduling
Enter the requested number of nights plus any special scheduling
constraints here. Please note: the minimum total request for
Australian Magellan time is two nights. If you require half nights
only, then the total number of full nights must still be at least
two, i.e. four half nights.
If the program is part of a joint project involving other Magellan
partners, then it is possible to ask for one night, however this
must be explained in the technical details of the proposal.
If you are seeking partial nights then fill out the Total Request
with the total number of nights your request would occupy.
(e.g. if you want 8 first-half-only dark nights, then put 4 under the total for dark
(not 8) and indicate the partial nature of the request in the section
that follows.)
Please fill out only one of the Dark, Grey, or Bright fields in
the form, unless you are specifically requesting a combination of more
than one. If you can use either of Dark/Grey (or Bright/Grey), then
mention this in the Technical discussion, but do not put
(say) "4 Dark or 6 Grey", as the software which processes your
proposal will not distinguish this from "4 Dark plus 6 Grey", and the
panel may not look favourably upon your request for 10 nights, which
is more time than available!
Something else to keep in mind is that there are never more
than four grey nights in succession.
Question 4: Instrumentation
Specify your required instrument set-up here, including gratings,
filters, slit widths, etc, where appropriate. Please consult the
Magellan
Instrument webpages for detailed information about available
instruments and possible configurations.
Two instruments: Applicants seeking time for the same
project but with more than one instrument should
submit just the one application, but fill in the details
for both instruments in Question 4 in the spaces provided.
The application should also detail the
required breakdown of time between the two instruments in the
Scientific Justification, and
discuss any Special Scheduling Constraints for the different
instruments in Question 3 of the form as well.
Question 5: Observing Requirements
Specify the observational demands of your program in terms of
signal-to-noise ratio and resolution. Be sure to include units
in the values you quote (e.g. per pixel, per angstrom).
Question 6: Related Proposals (in this semester)
Please list all related proposals submitted to other facilities,
irrespective of whether they have been granted time
or are pending requests.
Question 7: Previous Related Proposals
ATAC requires that applicants list here all applications for this, or
any related projects, regardless of whether they were granted time
or not. (Do not list your recent applications for any separate projects,
unrelated to the present proposal.)
Question 8: Scientific and Technical Justification
A scientific case should be included in the application. This
should be no more than three pages including all references and
figures (additional pages will be ignored), in 11pt font (or larger),
and a 10mm margin (or greater).
There is a 2 Mb file-size limit on all three-page science case PDF uploads.
Other document formats (e.g. postscript) will not be accepted.
We will strictly enforce these limits.
Although there is some freedom in the layout of the science case,
applicants are strongly advised against poor formatting
such as densely-packed text; no inter-paragraph spacing; or narrow
margins (<10 mm). Experience has shown that these never fail
to make a bad first impression.
Care should be taken to ensure that your Science Case includes the
following elements:
- Full Technical Details, outlining
how you derived your time estimates, constraints on the observing such
as phase of moon, and any special requests should be included in the
scientific case, (preferably under a separate section heading).
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If your proposal seeks time on two instruments,
outline carefully in the case the
relative requirements of the different instrument set-ups, including
the split in observing time between the instruments.
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If the observations are essential to the completion of a student's PhD
thesis, then a full explanation must be given in the science case.
No special consideration is given
to proposals involving PhD students, except when attempting to schedule
proposals near the cut-off, when some priority may be given.
Question 9: List of Principal Targets
A list of the principal targets should be uploaded in a PDF document here.
Please include (at least):
- Target name
- RA (h m s)
- Dec (° ' '')
- target brightness
- priority
- Filter in which target brightness is given
- Exposure time
There is a 2 Mb file-size and 2-page limit on this PDF upload. Other document formats
(e.g. postscript) will not be accepted.