Dear Colleagues, This message announces two changes in the process for ARC's 30 May call for proposals regarding post-2008 science operations at APO: 1 - The deadline for receipt of the full proposals is now July 31 rather than July 17 as originally specified in the CfP. 2 - All groups planning to respond to the CfP should submit a brief Notice of Intent (NOI) by the original July 17 deadline. Details follow re both changes; please read the entirity of this message if you are planning to submit a proposal. 1 - Deadline delay: It has become clear, mostly only within the last 24-48 hours, that multiple groups planning to submit proposals will not be able to prepare them adequately, or perhaps at all in some cases, by the original July 17 deadline. The originally announced timeline was, of course, ambitiously fast (especially for the summer months) and unknowingly nearly coincided with the NSF Career Grant deadline on July 20, so the difficulty in meeting it is understandable. Nevertheless, an extension at this late date is clearly not ideal; it will add further pressure to the process of getting a new project selected and ready by mid-2008 and is arguably unfair to those groups which have managed, via whatever struggle and with whatever impact on other obligations, to have their proposal already finished or nearly so. However, those undesirable consequences of this late change seem less severe than the cost of not being able to consider one or more attractive options for long term science ops at APO or of not having satisfactory proposals on which to base the selection. 2 - The ultimate schedule impact of the extension of the deadline will be significantly reduced if we can go ahead and begin lining up the "mail reviewers" 2 or 3 of whom will be evaluating the science case for each proposal, as previously announced. In order to let this process start early next week (and before I and others involved depart on August travel), a brief NOI for each proposal to be submitted by the July 31 deadline is required. It should be emailed to Bruce Gillespie at gillespie@apo.nmsu.edu and me at elt@astro.princeton.edu . An ascii text message in any convenient format will be fine. It should include at least the following info: a title; a brief abstract (no more than a few sentences) stating the projects major science goals, basic plan (i.e., what type of observations with what equipment to obtain what sort of data which will be used/analyzed in what way) and overall scope (roughly how much telescope time, money, for how many years...); and a list of all currently identified participants, individuals and institutions. The idea is not to give many details or allow any evaluation of the proposal but only to permit us to go ahead and start lining up suitable reviewers. Please accept my apologies for this last minute change in the process, which I hope will produce a better and more reliable result for ARC and all concerned. Ed Turner Chair, ARC Board of Governors APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 977 in the apo35-general archive. You can find APO the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-general/INDEX.html APO To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu APO To post a message, mail it to apo35-general@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO