Regular and Large Programs
Observing time for the telescopes of the “Observatorios de Canarias” (OOCC): GTC, WHT, INT, TNG, NOT, Mercator, and Liverpool on La Palma Island, and Stella on Tenerife, is offered and allocated twice a year in periods of 6 months in the case of regular and large programs (also applicable to Spain-Mexico and IAC-Nordic collaborative time proposals). Calls for proposals are usually opened in March and September every year. Meetings of the committee usually take place in May and November.
To be able to send regular and large proposals to the night CAT, you must previously register at http://cat.iac.es (if you have not done it yet), for which you must choose a username, password and e-mail address. This creates a personal account where your personal information and history of your submissions to the CAT is maintained, with the obvious corresponding advantages. When registering, you must indicate your affiliation from the available list. Once you have filled in the registration form, you should activate your account using a code that will be sent to you by e-mail. Co-applicants (or co-investigators) must also be registered. To register, co-applicants must follow the same process described above. It is advisable that all principal investigators and co-applicants register at http://cat.iac.es well in advance of the proposals due date. However, to speed up the process of submission of proposals the person sending the proposal may register all co-applicants not previously registered (it will only be necessary to provide their e-mail addresses). Nevertheless, for security reasons, the account activation can only be performed by the co-applicant (as soon as he receives notification by e-mail).
Submission of regular and Large proposals requires:
- Filling in the web form at http://cat.iac.es, which consists of a number of obligatory fields (title, abstract, co-Is, requested time and instrumentation, observing mode, …). This application will create the front cover of the proposals. A simple manual to use the http://cat.iac.es application is available through this PDF document.
- Additional mandatory fields, such as the “Scientific Justification”, “Justification for the Amount of Time Requested” and “duplicities”, will be added to the proposal through http://cat.iac.es in the form of a supplementary PDF file. This PDF file can have a free format/layout and can be created using different software (e.g., Word, LaTeX, etc.). However, the document must contain critical Sections, which are indicated in the LaTeX, Word, and Pages templates available here (read the README file first). Note that the supplementary PDF file must not exceed four (4) pages for regular/normal proposals and six (6) pages for large programs, including images, tables and references, otherwise proposals will be rejected. Within it, the subsection “S.1. Scientific Rationale and Immediate Objectives” must not exceed ONE page for regular/normal programs, and TWO pages for Large Programs.
Your user area (http://cat.iac.es) also contains a menu (BIBcodes) where the references to the publications derived from previous observations with the CAT telescopes should be stored. The information (fields Comment and Bibliographic code) should be updated, because in the evaluation of proposals CAT will take into account the good use that proposers have done of the time allotted in previous years.
DDT and Service Programs