Science Operations Announcements

Gemini North Shutdown Extended

September 17th, 2021

Due to unforeseen issues with the Acquisition and Guiding System the Gemini North engineering shutdown will be extended.
We will update this page as information becomes available.

2021-Oct-04: The issues with the Acquisition and Guiding system have been resolved and on-sky instrument checks have begun!

Gemini North Shutdown Extended due to COVID-19

September 8th, 2021

Due to the recent spike of COVID-19 cases in Hawai'i the Gemini North engineering shutdown has been extended through the end of the day on Friday, September 17, and the 2021B telescope schedule has been updated accordingly. The MAROON-X visiting instrument block will start as scheduled on Tuesday, September 21, however, the NIFS installation has been postponed until December.

Observing databases offline June 8

June 7th, 2021

The Gemini observing databases will be offline for several hours on Tuesday, June 8 while we perform software updates.

During this time the following services will be unavailable:

  • Observing Tool synchronizations and file transfers
  • Phase I Tool guide star probability queries
  • Target of Opportunity triggers

The new 2021B Observing Tool will be available after the update and will be required to access the observing databases.

Virtual machine image for running IRAF under recent MacOS releases

May 19th, 2021

A CentOS 7 virtual machine image (OVA file) is now available to facilitate running Astroconda IRAF under MacOS 10.15+, which no longer supports running the necessary 32-bit binaries natively. This comes with Anaconda 2019.10, Gemini IRAF 1.14, DRAGONS 2.1.0 and other packages from Astroconda pre-installed. Users of MacOS 10.14 affected by the Tk bug that causes a desktop session logout when displaying graphics may also want to install this guest distribution as a workaround.

Pages