2005-2010: CFHT’s Golden Age… and beyond?

C. Veillet – Executive Director, CFHT

As you will discover by reading the CFHT’s Progress Report prepared by Pierre Martin, three excellent instruments are now in operation at CFHT:  MegaPrime/MegaCam, WIRCam and ESPaDOnS.  Observing time at CFHT is therefore very precious to the communities, as seen in the graph showing the telescope oversubscription (or pressure on observing time) for Canada and France over the past 10 semesters.  As data processing is now an essential component of these instruments and with the adoption of the Queued Service Observing (QSO) mode for both MegaPrime and WIRCam, CFHT’s duty is not only to maintain the facility and the instruments in pristine condition, a challenging task by itself with the increasing complexity of this new instrumentation; its duty is also to observe over an estimated 85% to 90% of the time, to prepare and acquire the necessary calibration, to pre-process and calibrate the images, to assess the final quality of the data and to distribute them.

Assuming that WIRCam will be used for at least 5 years and that follow-up and complementary observations of the CFHTLS with MegaPrime will be highly desirable, CFHT needs to operate at its best at least until the end of 2010, with a skilled staff in an increasingly complex environment, to be ready to meet expectations from the community that were never as high as they are now. This is, in the current context of the large projects undertaken by the CFHT communities, a real challenge. Receiving more funding from the current members, attracting potential partners, retaining the dynamics of the Corporation and maintaining its staff, none of that can be achieved without a clear plan covering the 2005-2010 period: a plan exciting enough that the staff, the member agencies, potential other funding partners or new customers will be ready to devote time, energy or funds to keep CFHT at the forefront of astronomy up to the early years of the next decade.

Such a plan, “2005-2010: CFHT’s Golden Age”, was presented to the CFHT Board of Directors in December 2004 and endorsed as a good basis for the development of the observatory for the coming years. Focusing on the excellence of the services rendered to the community, on the efficiency of the Observatory and on leading-edge technical developments, this plan will allow the CFHT Corporation to work at its best for six years and to be ready beyond the 2010 era. The plan foresees a major instrumental development that would serve three purposes: – get the best of the creativity of the skilled staff otherwise needed to maintain and even improve the quality and efficiency of the services provided by the observatory – prepare the future of the Corporation for 2011 and beyond – provide the communities with an opportunity to validate new technologies or ideas to be potentially used for other developments on ELTs.

During 2006, CFHT will conduct a feasibility study of a new instrumental concept, VASAO, “Visible All Sky Adaptive Optics”. Building on an extensive and successful experience in Adaptive Optics (AO) and on recent developments made in the CFHT funding nations, VASAO is an integrated AO system that would allow diffraction limited imaging of the whole sky in the visible, thanks to a polychromatic mode-less laser guide star coupled to a specially designed tip-tilt sensor used with Pueo-Hou, a refurbished and improved AO bonnette based on Pueo, the current CFHT AO system. VASAO could open a new era in astronomical observations in the visible, providing a 100% coverage of the Mauna Kea sky at a resolution better than the Hubble Space Telescope, and similar in the visible to what larger telescopes can obtain in the near-infrared.

The science case for VASAO will be built with the input from the CFHT communities, which will also be asked to share ideas on instruments that could use VASAO. Watch your e-mailbox for a mailing on VASAO (if you haven’t already received it!), and do not hesitate to share your comments and ideas during the feasibility study phase of what could become a major and very exciting development at CFHT. More information on VASAO is available on CFHT’s web site (www.cfht.hawaii.edu/VASAO/ ).