Kieron Leech
Intense interest has been generated by the observation by the Hubble Space Telescope of one area of the sky to unprecedented depths. The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is a single roughly 2' square field located at 12 36 49.42 +62 13 46.3 (J2000) that was the subject of approximately 150 orbits worth of HST observations through the F300W, F450W, F606W and F814W filters (approximately U, B, R and I). This produced the deepest optical images ever obtained, down to a limiting AB magnitude of 27.5 to 29. For information on the results of the HDF project see their WWW page http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdf.html
The purpose of this note is to detail ISO policy towards the HDF, as the announcement of the HDF project was made after the deadline for responses to ISO 's Call for Observing Proposals.
An amount of ISO time, up an average of 30 minutes per day, has been reserved as ``discretionary time'', for ``observations which could not have been foreseen at the time of proposal submission''. The HDF project meets these guidelines; thus, ISO will accept discretionary time proposals for this field. No Open Time or Guaranteed Time proposer will be allowed to redirect their existing proposal towards this field.
ISO has stringent visibility constraints which mean that it will only be possible to observe the HDF in the periods from revolution 136 - 237 (April 1 to July 10 1996), again (for a very limited time per day) from revolution 323 - 353 (October 4 to November 3 1996) and finally an even poorer window from revolution 534 - 603 ( May 3 to July 10 1997)
Regarding data rights, ISO 's policy is as follows. Successful proposers will be responsible for the detailed planning of the observations and will be granted exclusive data rights for a reduced period of three months as compared to the normal one-year proprietary period. At the end of that period the data will be made public by ESA.
Electronic proposals, prepared using release 1.0 of the IRPSS software, requesting ISO time to observe the HDF MUST be submitted to the ISO HELPDESK account (helpdesk@iso.vilspa.esa.es) by 8 March 1996. No paper copies are necessary. They will then be reviewed by the Observing Time Allocation Committee (OTAC). The degree of international collaboration involved will play a role in OTAC's evaluation of the proposals. Successful proposers will be invited to enter full ``Phase 2'' details of their observations during March/April 1996.
Detailed information on how to request Discretionary Time may be found by consulting the ISO Science Operations Centre's WWW home page at URL http://www.iso.vilspa.esa.es
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Kieron Leech