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| 2005 | |
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CFHT makes a major Discovery in the Outer Solar System. A team of astronomers working in Canada, France and the United States have discovered an small body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune with an unusual circular and highly inclined orbit. |
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New instrument spies magnetic field inside star's disk. CFHT's new instrument ESPaDOnS, a spectropolarimeter, has led to the first direct detection of the magnetic field inside a star's disk. |
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Dark Energy with the CFHT Legacy Survey! The first results of the SNLS survey, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, place strong constraints on cosmological models |
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Semester 2006A is now open for proposals.
The proposal submission deadline is 2005 Sep 21 - 24:00 UTC. |
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The Report of the 67th Meeting of the Scientific Advisory Council is available here. It includes the report on the CFHTLS Mid-term Review as well as the summary of principal actions taken by the CFHT Board of Directors in response to these reports. |
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Animation of comet Tempel 1 obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope with MegaCam, during the impact can be seen here. |
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Spectacular images of the comet Tempel 1 obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope with MegaCam, two days prior to the impact, can be seen here. |
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The April 2005 issue of Hoku, the Astronomy Newsletter for Educators and Parents, is online. This issue features fascinating links on Albert Einstein's Legacy. |
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CFHT contributes to the discovery of mysterious new star clusters. These new clusters resemble globular clusters but are much larger and hundreds of times less dense. |
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WIRCam Large Programs: First Call for
Proposals.
The Canadian and French Agencies, through the CFHT Board of Directors (BoD), have indicated their willingness to make a significant fraction (25% to 50%) of their bright time available to large programs executed with WIRCam. WIRCam Large Program observations will be carried out as queue scheduled observations (QSO) starting with semester 2006A. Deadline for the first submission of such Large Programs will be August 24, 2005 at 24:00 UTC. |
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Semester 2005B is now open for proposals.
The proposal submission deadline is 2005 March 23 - 24:00 UTC. |
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The webpage for
WIRCam, CFHT's new
Wide-Field
instrument for the IR, is ready. WIRCam has four 2048 x 2048 pixel HAWAII2-RG detectors, a 20 arcminute x 20 arcminute field-of-view and a sampling of 0.3 arcsecond per pixel. First light will take place in the first semester of 2005 and the instrument is offered for 2005B on a shared-risk basis. |
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The CFHTLS, with nearly 500 nights allocated over a five-year period, is a major commitment from the Canadian and French Agencies as well as a major scientific program for CFHT. To offer to the CFHTLS users an opportunity to share their experience with the CFHTLS data and their first scientific analysis, and to provide SAC with an opportunity to meet CFHTLS users, CFHT is organizing a workshop in Paris (IAP) just before the SAC meeting on May 26 and 27. |
| 2004 | |
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The Volume 4, Number 3 edition of the HOKU newletter is now available. This Christmas edition contains a link to an interview with Santa Claus, and advice for buying a telescope. |
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The ESPaDOnS commissioning has started on Nov. 28. The raw data are available at http://limu.cfht.hawaii.edu:872/04bd50/ about 20 minutes after they are created at the summit. |
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For its 25th anniversay, CFHT has released a spectacular image made up of tens of hours of telescope time spent on a single 1 degree by 1 degree field for the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS), one of CFHT's most ambitious scientific endeavors so far. |
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ESPaDOnS's first light occurred around 10pm on the first engineering night, Sept. 2. These first 2 nights were very successful, and the instrument behaves very well. Consult CFHT's ESPaDOnS webpage for more details. |
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Semester 2005A is now open
for proposals.
The proposal submission deadline is 2004 September 22 - 24:00 UTC. |
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ESPaDOnS, the new échelle spectropolarimeter, is nearing its assembly and testing phase at the summit. The spectrograph and calibration/polarimeter module are now assembled in the Inner Coude room and at the telescope respectively, and the mechanisms are all working well under computer control. A few pictures are available on CFHT's ESPaDOnS webpage. |
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The Volume 4, Number 2 edition of the HOKU newletter is now available. The issue is dedicated to Mark and the "Make A Wish" Foundation for allowing a young boy to visit Hale Pohaku and the Mauna Kea Visitors Center. Previous issues of Hoku are also available in the Hoku archive. |
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ESPaDOnS has arrived at the summit of the Mauna Kea! Here are a few pictures taken on that morning. |
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The MegaPrime Image Quality Investigation is officially launched... Go to its web page to get the last news on the progress of the investigation! |
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The Volume 4, Number 1 edition of the HOKU newletter is now available. The issue is dedicated to our pal, Flat Stanley, a very special visitor at CFHT. |
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Semester 2004B is now open
for proposals.
The proposal submission deadline is 2004 March 25 - 24:00 UTC. |
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The 7th CFHT Users' Meeting, "The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in the Wide-field Imaging Era and Beyond", will be held at the Painter's Lodge, Campbell River (British Columbia), on 13-15 May 2004. Held approximately every three years, the Users' Meetings are intended to provide a forum for members of the CFHT astronomical communities to share their recent CFHT-based discoveries with their colleagues, learn about new facilities, and discuss future directions for the Observatory. It is anticipated that one day of the meeting will be devoted to early MegaPrime science, as well as an open discussion of the Legacy Survey. A second day of sessions will be devoted to other recent exciting CFHT science results, as well as presentations of the opportunities provided by the new facility instruments WIRCam and ESPaDOnS. The Saturday morning session will include a retrospective of CFHT's first 25 years and also provide an opportunity for an update on the future direction of the Observatory. Further information can be found on the meeting web site at: http://www.astrosci.ca/cfht2004. |
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A team of astronomers has discovered objects in a nearby galaxy group that may be small, young galaxies that have formed only recently. If confirmed, these objects would be among the nearest examples of small galaxies formed from gas expelled by a larger galaxy due to close encounters with other galaxies in the group. The astronomers reported their discovery at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The observations were made with CFHT's now retired wide-field imager CFH12k, in QSO mode. |
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We are pleased to announce the first release
of elixir
data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) to
the CFHTLS community! The URL of the top page is
http://cadcwww.hia.nrc.ca/cfht/cfhtls/
for the english version and
http://cadcwww.hia.nrc.ca/cfht/cfhtls/cfhtls_public_fr.html
for the french version.
The CFHTLS is a major imaging project aimed at solving some fundamental astrophysical questions in our understanding of planetary systems and the distant Universe. More than 450 nights of CFHT time will be devoted to the Survey over the next five years, using the MegaPrime imager. Details about the survey are available on the CFHTLS official webpage. |
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For the first time, astronomers have identified an extrasolar planet with a magnetic field. HD 179949 was observed with the high-resolution spectrograph Gecko in 2001 and 2002. See also the Press Release on the University of British Columbia website. The PowerPoint presentation and Word file for the Press Release can be found at http://cadcwww.hia.nrc.ca/cfht/aas/. |
| Headline News for 2003 |
| Headline News from August 2001 to December 2002 |
| Headline News from January 1999 to August 2001 |