1st Announcement
Workshop on Science with the Nordic Optical Telescope
Aarhus University, 25-26 October 2012
The original concept for the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) was an
independent, general facility for observational projects by Nordic
astronomers. However, the scientific and organisational context in which
it will operate in the future will be greatly different from twenty years
ago when the telescope was built: The future of the NOT will be as a
specialised tool in the panoply of facilities available to modern
astronomy, focused on scientific fields where it can optimally serve the
best Nordic research teams. For this, it is intended to base the future
strategic planning for the NOT primarily on a set of large research
programmes, proposed and evaluated in a series of five-year cycles.
For the NOT to be maximally competitive in this context, we plan to equip
it with a single new, permanent focal plane instrument, offering rapid and
flexible optical and NIR imaging and spectroscopic response capabilities
on transient and variable sources as its first scientific priority. This
will be complemented by the FIES spectrograph, upgraded to yield
high-precision spectropolarimetry, and also permanently available.
Together with an upgraded data management system, this will make the NOT a
very competitive tool for studying a wide range of transient and variable
astrophysical sources - extragalactic as well as stellar - in the coming
decade.
The NOT Council has decided to organise a workshop to inform the Nordic
user community of the NOT about these plans and to get feedback
directly from the community. The workshop will also provide an opportunity
to forge new consortia capable and interested in proposing large programs
and raising financial support to supplement the basic operational budget
provided by the Nordic research councils, the owners of the basic
facility. We therefore urge participants already now to begin considering
the formation of (the cores of) such consortia and to make sure that
their interests will be properly represented at the workshop.
All NOT users are therefore invited to a NOT workshop that will take place
Thursday and Friday, 25-26 October 2012 at the Stellar Astrophysics
Centre, Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University, Denmark.
More information will be emailed soon, including the detailed program and
information on how to do the registration for the workshop. We hope to see
a large fraction of the NOT users at Aarhus University in the end of
October.
