SOFIA Proposal Tools Webinar

In its first Proposal Tools Webinar held exactly four weeks before the deadline of the Call for Proposals (6 September 2019 PDT), the SOFIA Science Center offered an interactive, web-based course on the proposal tools available for Cycle 8. This webinar was for astronomers world-wide who were considering a SOFIA proposal or working on one, to help proposers avoid the typical pitfalls in observing time estimates and enhance the Technical Feasibility section of their proposals.

Note: for archival/historical purposes, resources for Cycle 9 and 10 are included below in addition to Cycle 8.

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2019 Cycle 8 webinar

With a focus on FIFI-LS, FORCAST, GREAT, and HAWC+, the webinar was divided into presentations on the instruments’ technical performance and capabilities, followed by live demonstrations of the proposal tools while working through sample proposal submissions. Participants were given the opportunity to ask questions in real-time while being guided through detailed examples to learn how to use the SOFIA Integration Time Estimator (SITE), decide on an observing strategy, and create astronomical observing requests (AORs) in USPOT.

2020 Cycle 9 webinar

The 2020 Cycle 9 Proposal Tools Webinar was held on August 18, 2020 at 8-10:30 am PDT. Links to the presentations and webinar videos are in the table below.

This webinar was intended to provide practical information to both experienced and prospective SOFIA users on how to best design a scientifically and technically strong SOFIA proposal for Cycle 9.

For each SOFIA instrument, science staff members presented realistic science examples and demonstrated how to determine the necessary signal to noise, choose the observing strategy, observing time estimation with SITE and design the corresponding Astronomy Observation Request with USPOT. A focus was put on avoiding the typical pitfalls on SNR calculation.

A general presentation introduced the main science cases addressed by SOFIA, and the general capabilities of the instrument suite, as well as the specific features offered during Cycle 9, including the Dual Anonymous Review framework.

Cycle 10 Resources