WIYN 3.5m Observatory

WIYN Status - Proposer Information

NOIRLab Time on WIYN

The NSF's NOIRLab will continue to offer access to WIYN and its instruments to the national community, albeit with a focus on research programs that are related to exoplanets. Interested observers should consult the NOIRLab Observing Proposal Call for details. This does not apply to people applying for time through WIYN's university partners.

Instrument availability

There are several key things to note about the availability of 3.5-m instruments:

NEID: The new, cutting edge, high-precision spectrograph designed for radial velocity measurements of exoplanet host stars will be available on WIYN. NEID is designed with a goal of achieving 27 cm/s precision per data point, providing the US exoplanet community with high-precision radial velocity measurements appropriate for studying Earth and super-Earth mass planets orbiting bright host stars over a wide range of spectral type. Other investigations that hinge on extreme RV precision can also make good use of NEID. The NOIRLab operates NEID in a queue scheduled mode and NExScI employs pipeline data reductions on all observations to provide PIs with high-level data products, including high-precision radial velocities.
Long-term proposals: NN-EXPLORE accepts proposals for large, long-term programs, defined as those that require between 2 and 4 semesters. A maximum of 8 nights per semester will be made available in total for all long-term programs.
Beginning in 2023B, for NEID only, to better account for nightly calibrations that are not incorporated into proposer overhead, proposers should assume that 1 night is equivalent to 9 hrs.
Further information about NEID, including how to propose for time, can be found within the NEID web pages.
PLEASE NOTE: NEID will be unavailable August 1–30. Limited low-precision mode might be available September 1–13 (TBD).
The queue-operated speckle imager NESSI (NN-Explore Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager) will continue to be offered this semester.
ODI will not be available in 2026B
The IFUs (Hexpak, Gradpak and Sparsepak) and WHIRC may have limited availability in 20206B.

Remote Observing

Remote observing at WIYN is available to all qualified observers (see the remote observing policies). Those wishing to observe remotely with ODI must do so from a pre-approved (and tested) workstation. More information can be found on the WIYN Remote Observing page.