General Information

Paranal Science Operations (PSO) is the department of the La Silla Paranal Observatory that is in charge of the operation of the telescopes on Paranal. These telescopes are:

• The four Unit Telescopes (UTs) forming the VLT.
• The VLTI, which is the interferometric combination of either the UTs or the Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs).
• The VST and VISTA survey telescopes (soon).

PSO News

• 2007-Jul-30 New procedure for backup/additional target requests, and set-up change requests
• 2007-Apr-01 LGSF policies published.

Information for Observers

In the PSO pages, you should find all the information you need for your observations from the time you have an idea of observations until when you finish processing your data. The menu on the left contains the list of the PSO pages for the astronomers, which are described in more details hereafter. Also, some useful ESO pages (not belonging to PSO) can be accessible from the left sub-menus and are explained in this page.

• Preparing your proposals for observing time and your observations

  • Call for Proposals: CfP
  • Target of Opportunity Proposals
  • Director discretionary time
  • ETC: Exposure Time Calculators.
  • Tools to compute ephemerides, visiblity, airmass, etc.

• Visiting astronomer coming to Paranal:

  • Before your observation run: you should familiarize yourself with the technical documentation (see below), and with P2PP. This Visitor Information page contains the info you will need. From that page, you will also find informations on the Computers at your disposal, as well as on the Data Reduction Software installed.

    Remember to prepare a backup program in case of poor seeing, thin clouds or strong winds (usually implying targets with Dec < -25deg), the list of additional objects you want to observe in addition to your approved targets and to request their approval well in advance using this procedure NEW - Jul.2007 - requests have to be sent using the webform included in the updated procedure

  • Arriving on Paranal, you should also check out the practical information you should find in your room (or here as a PDF file)

• Service Observation

  • All you need for Phase 2 and afterward is on the USD Phase 2 page

• After the observations...

  • End of Mission Report:

    Please complete an end-of-mission report when your observing run is completed.

  • Pipe-lines and Quality Control pages (DFO Garching)
  • Science Archive (Garching)

• Special cases - Targets of Opportunity and Director Discretionary time:

  • DDT Instructions: how to apply for Director Discretionary time
  • RRM trigger: instructions for triggering Rapid Response Mode Observations.
  • RRM Status: log of the instrument status and of the RRM triggers.
  • ToO Policies: the rules governing the execution of ToO at the La Silla Paranal Observatory.
  • ToO Trigger form, to request the execution of an approved ToO observation.

• Other policies

  • General VLT/VLTI Science Operations Policy as defined by the ESO Counsil (pdf)
  • LGSF Policies: the rules governing the possible conflict arising because of the Laser Guide Star Facility.

Technical Information

• Paranal:

  • Information about the site position, general weather information, seismicity...
  • Weather, past, present and forecasted
  • Forecasts for advanced users.
  • Ambiant condition database: access the database for any past night.
  • LOSSAM: the Line of Sight absorption for last night.

• Telescopes

  • VLT Unit Telescopes
  • Soon: VST, the VLT Survey Telescope (external page)
  • Soon: VISTA, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (external page)
  • DIMM, the seeing monitor.
  • MASCOT, the all-sky camera.

• Instruments

  • Instrumentation overview
  • News from the Paranal Instrumentation Team