Issues with the Acquisition and Guidance unit and secondary mirror control system have been resolved and Gemini North is back on sky. Instrument and telescope checkouts are now complete and queue observations have resumed.
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!
Due to COVID constraints the planned telescope shutdown at Gemini South has been moved from last two thirds of October to November. The shutdown will start on November 2nd and end November 27th (estimate). The updated telescope schedule can be found here.
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.
Gemini is now accepting proposals for observing time in Semester 2022A. The submission deadline varies with participant. A new version of the Phase I Tool (PIT) has been released to support proposal submissions.
Gemini 2021B observing programs and schedule have been announced. Notification emails were sent to successful PIs on June 15, 2021. Please check the schedules page for more information. Note that the latest version of the Observing Tool is required to access and update 2021B programs.
The 2021B Gemini Observing Tool is now available for download. This update is required to access the Gemini Observing Databases.
The Installation Instructions are linked on the Observing Tool web page, and we recommend that everyone download their programs from the databases rather than import from saved XMLs.
See the the Release Notes for a complete list of changes.
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:
The new 2021B Observing Tool will be available after the update and will be required to access the observing databases.
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.
The cases of COVID-19 have continued to grow in the Coquimbo region, in particular in La Serena, Coquimbo and Vicuña. After careful consideration of the pandemic situation in the Coquimbo region and to safeguard the health of the observatory staff, the April 2021 GeMS/GSAOI run has been cancelled. We hope that observations later in the semester will be possible.