Phase II procedures for ESO Public Surveys

Public Survey projects are large collaborative survey programmes scheduled on VISTA and VST, that will address many of the open fundamental astrophysics questions and at the same time will provide useful observations for the whole astronomical community. Currently there are approved 6 public surveys on VISTA and 3 public surveys on VST. The VISTA public surveys are expected to start at the end of 2009.

The public surveys are scheduled in service mode and submission of Phase II package for Public Surveys must follow the same procedure as regular programmes, described in the Instructions for Phase II preparation of Service Mode runs. For specific information regarding VISTA or VST observations please select the appropriate instrument in the upper right Instrument Selector pull-down menu.

The following important points must be taken into account when preparing the Phase II package for ESO Public Surveys:

• The observation blocks for VIRCAM on VISTA have to be created with the new P2PP tool for surveys.
• A survey definition file, provided as input to P2PP for Surveys, is a file that contains the list of central coordinates of pointings for each tile, together with the lists of suitable gude stars and active optics stars. This file has to be prepared using Survey Area Definition Tool (SADT).
• For information about the VISTA telescope and its camera VIRCAM, please see the instrument web page and the VISTA/VIRCAM User's Manual.
• For observations with VIRCAM on VISTA there are some exceptions to the General Service Mode Rules.