CFHT's Next Scientific Survey
Call for Ideas

CFHT is initiating the process to design, implement, and carry out an ambitious scientific community-led survey that could be started as early as 2027 and last up to 5 years. This legacy survey will follow the next round of CFHT Large Programs that will be executed in 2025 and 2026. We are calling for letters of ideas for broad scientific themes or more specific proposals for this community-led survey.

Interested individuals and teams may submit their letters by November 15, 2024, by e-mail to director@cfht.hawaii.edu. Questions can be directed to manset@cfht.hawaii.edu.

The intent is to design a survey (or surveys) that will be carried out with MegaCam and/or Wenaokeao (co-mount of ESPaDOnS and SPIRou), serve the widest possible community of CFHT users, and have a significant scientific impact and/or legacy value. The final survey will be designed by members of the CFHT community and may combine 2 or more proposals or scientific themes.

The survey will use between 800 and 1400 nights over 5 years, with a maximum of 275 nights in a single year. Around half of this time (~ 140 nights/year) consists of dark nights suitable for MegaCam observations.

For this call, we are looking for scientific contributions and proposals for all or a significant fraction of the nights indicated above. Proposals should exploit the full range of observing parameters (RA distribution, sky conditions, seeing variations, etc.). All proposals should indicate whether non-CFHT communities can be invited to participate and contribute to the proposed survey.

CFHT observing conditions are available on this web page. All observations will be made in service mode and remotely. When estimating the number of nights, the following conversion for the number of hours per night (open shutter time + overheads charged to the users) for each instrument must be used:

  • MegaCam: 5.0 hours/night
  • Wenaokeao: approximately 7.0 hours/night

All raw and processed data will be shared immediately with the survey teams and will be nominally archived at CADC. Participating survey teams will be expected to contribute to data reduction and/or survey operations. The conditions for the public release of survey data will be defined at a later date by the CFHT Board and participating agencies.

Letters in response to this call for ideas should reflect the scale of the proposed observations. Proposals should not exceed 5 pages of scientific description. Additional documents may be provided as appendices, but are not mandatory.

In November 2024, the CFHT Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) will review the proposals and, based on the response to this call, determine the next steps towards the consolidation and development of the survey(s).

Interested individuals and teams may submit their letters by November 15, 2024, by e-mail to director@cfht.hawaii.edu. Questions can be directed to manset@cfht.hawaii.edu.

Useful resources:

Suggested format for responses to this call:

  1. Abstract / Executive Summary. 1 page
  2. Scientific justification, including figures. Up to 5 pages
  3. Technical Justification, including figures. Up to 2 pages
  4. Mandatory fields (1 page):
    • (a) Number of nights requested
    • (b) Instrument(s) to be used
    • (c) RA distribution of proposed observations
    • (d) Observation constraints according to Moon phase, seeing, weather conditions
    • (e) Suggestions of non-CFHT scientific teams that could enhance the scientific output of the project and contribute to its funding
    • (f) How the proposing teams can support survey execution, either remotely or through in-person secondments to CFHT for data reduction and/or survey operations.
  5. Optional field: comment on data access and proprietary period for raw and reduced data