Colorado ARC Proposal Guide Lines

• IMPORTANT NOTE - PLEASE READ!: Any material included on the above form when it is submitted for scheduling WILL APPEAR VERBATIM ON A PUBLICALLY ACCESSIBLE WEB SITE. If you wish for your TAC to consider information that you want kept confidential or restricted in any way, it should be submitted to them separately (from the above form) or you should arrange to have it removed before submission for scheduling. If you feel it is important for the 3.5-meter Director and/or APO staff to also have access to such confidential/restricted information, you must make special and separate arrangements with them; simply identifying such material on the template scheduling request will be ineffective.

• The PI is considered to be responsible for the productive use of the observing time and the safe use of the equipment. If the PI is not a member of the faculty or senior research staff, such an individual should be identified as a "sponsor" (and therefore responsible in the above sense). This is a general APO policy.

• List all observers. Remote observing may only be undertaken by, or with the direct help/supervision of, observers with on-site experience and training. Normally, this is taken to be at least 3 nights of time at APO. At the site, some help for experienced observers can be provided by the Observatory staff but training of graduate students or other inexperienced observers is not available; it is the responsibility of ARC institution faculty and staff. See message #219 in the apo35-general archive for a detailed statement of the policy.

• For programs carried out remotely, list all observers who are *not* certified for remote operations and state plans for the participation of certified remote observers for all remote observing. For programs which will be carried out on-site, list all observers who are untrained/inexperienced and state plans for providing the necessary supervision and instruction. See point #2 immediately above for further details.

• List all project scientific collaborators and include their institutional affiliation if not from an ARC institution.

• Indicate whether the time you request is bright, grey or dark or some mixture. Dark is moon below the horizon; grey is moon up but less than 50% phase, and bright is moon up and greater than 50% phase. It is helpful if you indicate the least restrictive (most moon) conditions which you can use without serious impact on your data. If omitted, you will probably be given whatever fits most conveniently into the schedule, probably bright time.

• Telescope time will be scheduled in half night blocks (split at APO solar midnight) for most programs, and time should be requested in these units in most cases.

• Scheduled science operations must sometimes be canceled for engineering or other purposes. In some cases Observatory management has limited discretion in the scheduling of such closures. If there are any reasons that a program deserves special or unusual protection (which, of course, is not always possible) from such interruptions, please state them clearly in the "special protection justification" section.

• The science justification need be no more than a paragraph or two. It is only intended to give readers an idea of what you are doing and how for scheduling purposes. Of course, if your institution uses this same form to allocate time, your TAC may require a more detailed justification. It is also useful to give enough information to allow the personnel at the site to appreciate any subtleties of the demands your program will place on the telescope or instrument(s). Similarly, the item requesting information on publications based on 3.5m observations will be used by the Observatory only to keep a record of the telescope's scientific contributions. Institutional TACs might use the information in allocation decisions if they wish.