Telescope Time for 2010B – Spring is back!

Well, like last year the month of March is characterized by a drop in my Blog posting. I should remind those who are not astronomers that in March (and in September), we are facing all the deadlines to ask for telescope time. This is a tedious but necessary task, since in my case if I don’t have data I can’t work (I don’t do theoretical astrophysics). The large observatories (Keck, VLT, Gemini) had the “great” idea to put their deadlines all together between mid-March and March 31, so all of us are in the final part of the rat race.

I tried last semester not to ask telescope time because I wanted to focus on the data that I currently own. It seems to me that it was important to take the time to analyze them before requesting for more data. We did some significant progress over the past 3 months, since I have several articles about to be submitted. Let’s hope that they will be on the Icarus Editor desk in 2 weeks as planned.

Last night, I submitted our proposals for Gemini and VLT and two weeks ago those for the Keck telescope. With my collaborators, we requested observing time with their AO systems to study multiple asteroid systems, search for new multiple asteroid systems in a specific sub-population of Small Solar System Bodies, monitor the volcanic activity of Io and study the atmospheric variation of Io in composition.

In total I estimated that our group has requested 3 full nights of observations in classical mode and ~80h of observations in service mode. Quite ambitious you may think… I suspect that 1/4 of these proposals will be accepted since these instruments have a high demand from our community (e.g. 1 proposal over 6 gets telescope time for the VLT/NACO).

So this short post was just to let you know that I am back. 🙂 I have a lot to tell about the past 4 weeks including an interesting workshop in Paris, the discovery of a Jupiter-like exoplanet and the first piece of our new instrument currently being built at the Observatoire de Paris and also the SETI Institute One-Minute Colloquium. So you should expect a landslide of posts soon, assuming that I will be able to write them while taking care of my kids who are in spring break.

The Spring is back here in San Francisco, CA. Spring means more sun, sun means beautiful sunrise like the one we had a few weeks ago that I could admire from my home shown below.

Sunrise in San Francisco (March 15 2010)

Enjoy the Spring,

Franck M.