This presentation highlights the 2024 instrumentation suite in use at the Baade and Clay telescopes of the Las Campanas Observatory. Following two decades of operations, the partnership between the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the University of Arizona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan provides our observing community with seven facility instruments and seven PI instruments. Five of those instruments (IMACS, MAGE, FIRE, FOURSTAR and LDSS3) are mounted permanently at the telescopes and ready to be used every night. The availability of one of the Nasmyth ports and a Cassegrain focus at the Clay telescope, allows a scheduled rotation of the other eight instruments (MIKE, PFS, M2FS, IFUM, PISCO, MAGAOX, MEGACAM, WINERED) according to the scientific needs of the community in each semester. In this presentation we will give a brief introduction for all the facility instruments followed by a status report of their use and performance. We will also present the challenges posed by continuous operations and regular maintenance. Finally, we will outline the future instrumentation projects and upgrades.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) is an all-sky, multi-epoch spectroscopic survey designed to decode the stellar evolution of the Milky Way, reveal the inner workings of stars, study the interstellar medium in the Local Volume of galaxies, and track the growth of supermassive black holes across the Universe. SDSS-V presents significant innovations in hardware and instrumentation, with the introduction of a new Focal Plane System instrument that enables multi-object spectroscopy using an array of 500 robotic fibre positioners, and the development of a new robotic observatory for the Local Volume Mapper program. These advances in instrumentation and operations necessitate a similarly evolved computing and software architecture to ensure survey efficiency and to take advantage of the improvements in software engineering and development. In this paper we present the cyberinfrastructure of the SDSS project with focus on the changes introduced since the previous iteration of the project, the adoption of new technologies, and the lessons learned in this process.
The Carnegie Observatories in 2019 celebrated 50 years since Las Campanas in northern Chile was chartered as the site for its large telescopes. Since that time Carnegie has deployed four telescopes, the Swope 1 meter, the du Pont 2.5 meter and, on behalf of the Magellan consortium, the two Magellan 6.5 meter. All telescopes are routinely used producing world class science. In this paper we will review the current science operations that are mainly performed in a classical observing mode, and then present the future strategies needed across the observatory to operate in survey, remote and robotic mode.
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