The call for proposals for telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access (TNA) programme has been released for their 2020-2021 semester. The Liverpool Telescope is included in the TNA programme, and instructions for applying for LT time are given in the OPTICON call below:
Ladies and Gentlemen
We are pleased to announce that the call for observing time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open.
See https://www.astro-opticon.org/h2020/tna/call/call-2020b.html.
The call will close on 1st March 2020 at 23.59UT.
Please review the web-page notes carefully, even if you have used the TNA programme before.
The semester is centred on Sept 2020 to Feb 2021, but there are small variations at some telescopes to accommodate their normal semesters and to maximise scheduling flexibility. Note that technical support for the submission software is not provided out-of-hours and late applications will not be accepted, so please complete your application in plenty of time. In recent semesters we have received between 40-50 proposals and allocated about 20 projects per semester.
The present EC contract ends on 31 December 2020. We anticipate that a new contract will come into force on 1 January 2021 and that any runs scheduled from that date onwards will be supported under this new contract. From a user's point of view we expect the conditions of this new contract to be almost identical. However there is a very small but finite risk that conditions may be different, or indeed that the putative new contract may not be granted. Proposers should therefore be aware that any runs after 31 December 2020 carry a small additional risk that they may not be scheduled, or that travel support might not be available.
Good Luck John Davies OPTICON Project Scientist
