Observing with NRAO Telescopes

Welcome to the Observing Center. Here you will find the resources you need to understand the proposal, observation and scheduling practices for NRAO telescopes.

Overview of the End to End Process

• Proposal Preparation (Phase I): The first step in the process is to submit your ideas to NRAO in the form of a proposal. This proposal should include information about the authors, information about the instrumental setups you wish to use for your observation, and a comprehensive justification of your science objectives. Your proposal will be competed against other proposals received during the same timeframe, so this phase is critical. To help you prepare the best proposal possible, be sure to review the Data Vault to make sure you are familiar with previous observations of your sources that have been made with NRAO telescopes.
• Observing (Phase II): After your proposal is submitted and reviewed by the Time Allocation Committee, you may be eligible to receive observing time on one or more NRAO telescopes. At this point, you will begin constructing your observations. Observations are created in the form of Scheduling Blocks, which are NRAO's "atomic units" of observing. Your complete set of data for your project will be the result of executing tens or hundreds of Scheduling Blocks, depending on the extent of your science program. You may observe remotely on on-site at an NRAO facility to execute your Scheduling Blocks, depending upon your past experience and proficiency with NRAO instruments.
• Scheduling: All accepted proposals are handed off to Scheduling Officers who manage the logistics of observations for each telescope. All NRAO telescopes currently in operations now implement some form of dynamic scheduling to ensure that the observers benefit from the best possible weather conditions. Scheduling for the VLA is done at the level of individual Scheduling Blocks, whereas at the GBT starting in Trimester 08B, dynamic scheduling will be done at the level of observing sessions (where the observer is free to choose the specific sequence of Scheduling Blocks).
• Data Processing: Although a quick look of the incoming data is available at the time of the observation, further processing and reduction of the data is necessary to get the highest quality spectra and images for scientific assessment. Scientists using NRAO telescopes for research use several different packages to reduce and analyze their data, depending on their specific needs and skills with the various software packages. Limited support is provided for some of these packages.
• Archive Access through the Data Vault: After a proprietary period of 12 months following the last observation for an observer's project, the raw data and any calibrations within the project are made public, and are available through the NRAO Data Vault.

Important Change for GBT Proposals Accepted for 08B Trimester

All proposals accepted for the 08B trimester will be part of a full test of the planned new GBT dynamic scheduling system (DSS). This test will be run through the entire 08B trimester. Note that the DSS tests will result in no change to the proposal preparation and submission process - once the refereeing process is complete, project investigators will be contacted on how to modify any information brought over from the PST which they desire to have changed before the trimester begins. GBT staff will, as always, be available to help observers both in working with the observing information in the DSS database and also with understanding the new dynamic scheduling scheme. It should also be noted that the DSS alters only the scheduling process for the GBT and will not affect the observing interface (e.g. Astrid) in any way. Further information on the GBT DSS can be found at here.