NICMOS Instrument Handbook for Cycle 11

NICMOS Proposal Preparation

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The NICMOS Instrument Handbook and the Call for Proposals for Cycle 11 (CP) should be used when assembling NICMOS Phase I Proposals. The CP provides policy and instructions for proposing. In addition, the HST Primer provides a basic introduction to the technical aspects of HST and its instruments and explains how to calculate the appropriate number of orbits for your Phase I observing time requests. The NICMOS Instrument Handbook contains detailed technical information about NICMOS, describing its expected performance, and presenting suggestions for use.

If the Phase I proposal is accepted, the proposer will be asked to submit a Phase II program in which the exact configurations, exposure times and sequences of observations that NICMOS and the telescope should perform are specified. To assemble the Phase II program the observer is referred to the NICMOS Instrument Handbook and to the Phase II Proposal Instructions. These instructions describe the rules and syntax that apply to the planning and scheduling of NICMOS observations and provide relevant observatory information.

At the time of this writing, the NCS has not been installed on HST yet. Given the uncertainties in the final NCS operating temperature, together with uncertainties in the NICMOS dark current (see Chapter 7), predictions of the performance of NICMOS should be treated as provisional, and users should adopt conservative expectations for proposing in Cycle 11.