Notes from the meeting of the Calar Alto Time Allocation Committee on April, 27/28 2005 in Heidelberg

The last meeting of the Calar Alto Time Allocation Committee was held on April, 27/28 2005 at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. In total, 116!!! proposal for the autumn semester 2005 had to be reviewed. They split of in 76 proposals (28 German, 38 Spanish, 10 International) for open time at the 3.5m telescope and 40 proposals (13 German, 20 Spanish, 7 International) for open time at the 2.2m telescope. The number of proposals submitted to the 3.5m telescope is the highest number ever recorded and naturally resulted in an extremely high oversubscription of ~3.5 (~4 for the Spanish community alone). This is almost comparable to the ovsersubscription at some of the VLT telescopes and clearly reflects the world-class instrumentation available at that telescope!!! As in the previous semesters, the oversubscription at the 2.2m telescope was relatively low (~1.3). It is remarkable that the number of proposal submitted from the Spanish community now clearly outnumbers the number of proposals from the German community.

It is obvious that given the huge number of proposals submitted on one hand and the limited time available for the TAC meeting on the other hand a discussion of all proposals is practically not possible (and even does not make sense). Hence dedicated strategies were adopted to discuss the proposals at the 3.5m and 2.2m telescopes.
As in the previous semester the lowest ranked 25% of the proposals submitted to the 3.5m telescope were discussed only upon request. This was the case for all proposals with an inital grade of 2.0 or above. In addition, some of the proposals with a very unfavorable RA-distribution of their targets were not discussed further (as already announced in the previous newsletter). This resulted to a total of 58 proposals to be discussed. The strategy was reversed for the 2.2m telescope. Here the top 12 ranked proposals were accepted and the remaining 28 discussed.

In the end, 25 proposals (10 German, 12 Spanish, 3 International) were accepted for the 3.5m telescope and 28 proposals (9 German, 13 Spanish, 6 International) were accepted for the 2.2m telescope. The cutoff was 1.45 for the 3.5m telescope and 1.75 for the 2.2m telescope. This left several nights available at either telescope. The TAC identified then a pool of proposals close to the cutoff line out of which the scheduler could select proposals based on the time of the semester requested. This was further necessary, since the oversubscription was not equally spread over the semester. While July and August were hardly oversubscribed, especially September and November/Dezember were strongly requested! Both, the MPIA and CSIC made full use of their guaranteed time at the 3.5m, while for the 2.2m telescope only one guaranteed time proposal had to be scheduled. This is the first semester, where more proposal from Spain as from Germany were accepted for both telescopes. This is not only a consequence of the high interest of the Spanish community on the Calar Alto observatory but is also justified by the highly competitive science presented.

The most important change for the next semester is the new application procedure. Applications by E-mail are not any longer possible. Instead the WEB-based interface CAST (Calar Alto Submission Tool) has to be used. The new application procedure should not pose any problems since the application template and the way to implement figures etc. hardly has changed. In fact, one has now to upload files instead to attach them. Details can be found at: here.
Starting with the next semester the TAC will not any longer communicate grades to the applicants. Instead the (old) ESO system will be adopted, i.e. only group assignments will be given in the notification letters (service A, accepted, close to the cut-off, far below the cut-off).
After two years of hard and constructive work, the 2 Spanish members Emilio Alfaro and Jose Pepe Vilchez will leave the TAC and will be replaced by 2 new Spanish members for the next meeting. Its a pleasure to thank them for having done an excellent job.
Starting from next semester Uli Thiele from CAHA will take over the job as TAC secretary. His predecessor, Hermann-Josef Röser, has done this job for more than 10 years. Without any doubt, being a TAC secretary is a hard but important job. Its imperative to thank Hermann-Josef for the many years of integrity, fairness and reliability!

Jochen Heidt