News

• 5 Sep 2023: The special GHOST Shared Risk Call for Proposals through FastTurnaround has been issued.  Proposal deadline is 30 Sept at 12:00 noon (HST), for observations during the GHOST run 30 November - 19 December.
• 1 Sep 2023: Reduced data from the SV run is expected to become available in the archive starting 6 Sept.  These were reduced with v0.9.4 and v1.0.0 of the GHOST DR pipeline using DRAGONS 3.0. Note that new installations of the DR software may not yet be possible, and further updates to the DR pipeline may still be possible ahead of the shared risk observations.  The reduced spectrophotometric standard observations are the _standard.fits files.  In the _dragons.fits files, all the orders have been stitched together with the wavelength on a log-linear scale, calibrated to in-air wavelengths, and corrected for barycentric motion. Sky subtraction was also performed.  The _calibrated.fits files are the reduced spectra before stitching the orders and the format of the file is more complex.
• 31 Aug 2023: The special GHOST Shared-risk call for proposals through Fast Turnaround is expected to be out Tuesday September 5.
• 12 Jul 2023: Evaluations of the data are being posted as they are received.  Check below in the science section for these.  The reduced data will be made available on the archive after a couple issues with the data reduction pipeline are resolved.
• 12 Jul 2023: There will be a series of GHOST webinars in late July/early August to help introduce GHOST to the community and present results of this SV process.  For more information and to sign up, check the webinar page.
• 14 Jun 2023: Raw data from the SV run are becoming publicly available from the archive.  All data should be available by 18 June.
• 24 May 2023: Details of the observations taken during the SV run are provided below .
• 18 May 2023: The successful SV run (May 9-17) has just concluded!  High priority observations from most of the programs were completed.  Details of the observations will be provided below in the coming week.  Raw data will be publicly available from the archive one month from the date taken.
• 9 May 2023: Observations are being taken for the GHOST SV run which started tonight.  Science cases are listed here.  Raw data will be released 1 month after it is observed.

Introduction

A GHOST System Verification (SV) observing run is planned for May 2023.   The purpose of this run is to:

• Perform end-to-end testing of the software, documentation, and operational procedures to prepare for larger scale deployment (i.e., GHOST Shared Risk Call for Proposals in 23B, Regular operations in 24A)
• Provide an initial set of publicly available GHOST data to showcase the commissioned capabilities and range of science and inform proposal preparation by the wider Gemini community

About 40 hours of engineering time have been allocated for GHOST SV observations.

Regular updates on the GHOST System Verification observation planning and results will be presented on this page.  An expected timeline is provided below.

A SV team, which includes Gemini observatory personnel and community representatives will plan, conduct, reduce, and evaluate the observations, and present the results to support broader community use of GHOST.  A subset of this group, the Instrument Science Team (IST), is primarily responsible for developing observations to take for SV, and reducing and analyzing those datasets. The IST is chosen in consultation with the Gemini Directorate, STAC, and the NRC-led GHOST Instrument team. 

SV Team