Telescope Performance & Metrics

• These charts show the projected science time availability (blue) at Gemini North. Non-science time is divided between telescope engineering (turquoise), commissioning of new instruments or of new instrument modes (red) and commissioning of non instrument-specific high level software (yellow).
• The profile of each category changes due to slippage in the delivery or commissioning phase of instruments. The charts are updated approximately every 6 months for planning purposes.
• The Gemini Board approves the percentage of science time of the telescopes for each semester. This is normally done at the Board meeting preceding any given Call for Proposals. 

• These schedules show the planned blocks of individual science instrument and engineering activities. Each instrument has its own colour code as shown in the schedule legend. Although indicated as separate events, in some cases the queue, classical, payback and demonstration science observing and engineering activities may overlap within a night. 
• In each schedule the month names are linked to the nightly execution log pages where details of the time use can be found. The individual instruments in the table legend are linked to the specific instrument pages. 
• The schedules are updated typically every 1-2 weeks and are subject to change without notice.
• Nightly execution logs and the updated queues are available from the main schedules page.

• Time loss statistics (due to weather, telescope and instrument technical problems) are collected on a nightly basis. The charts show weekly average time loss (histograms) and running averages from the start of the semester of overall system availability (datapoints, with and without inclusion of weather loss). Note: the time loss histograms use the left-hand scale and the availability datapoints use the right-hand scale (they are not necessarily the same). [Charts are opened in a new window].

• Each night (weather permitting), between one and a few images of a relatively dense stellar field are collected using the Acquisition Camera and R-band filter. Typically this occurs at the start of the night, when the primary mirror figure (active optics) is first tuned, and occasionally later during the night.
• The images are analyzed automatically and FWHM (image quality, corrected to zenith as sec(z)^0.6) and ellipticity values are derived.
• Image quality (IQ) histograms from previous semesters have been fitted with a fixed ("wall") and variable ("fit median") components and median raw IQ.
• Caution: as the Acquisition Camera measurements are most often obtained only at the start of the night these data may not be representative of the typical delivered optical image quality. Comparison with the image quality derived from imaging science instruments (such as the Flamingos campaigns, below) is underway. 

• Results from Gemini South observations with Flamingos-I near-IR imager runs: October 2001, June/July 2002

• The basic performance requirements are defined in the Science Requirements Document that guided overall telescope design and construction (frozen at SRD 3.0; 130k PDF) e.g. pointing, tracking, guiding, chopping, intrinsic image quality in the absence of atmosphere etc.
• A full comparison will be available here shortly, in the meantime there are some early performance results available.

• We track annual publication rates as well as listing individual publications arising from Gemini data.