_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      V   V   SSSS   OOO   PPPP                 \__      |_|      __/         
      V   V  S      O   O  P   P                   --____/ \____--            
      V   V   SSS   O   O  PPPP                    _ _ _ --- _ _ _            
       V V       S  O   O  P                      |_|_|_|  @|_|_|_|           
        V    SSSS    OOO   P                             o-o                  
                                                          /                   
      ***  N    E    W    S  ***                        <)                    

ANNOUNCEMENT OF OPPORTUNITY

The fourth Announcement of Opportunity for VSOP observing has been released. The deadline for proposals is 24:00 UT, Monday 2nd October, 2000. Observations from AO4 proposals may be observed as early as January 2001. The VSOP web site's AO page -- /astro/halca/vsop/obs/AO.html -- contains links to the Announcement of Opportunity, revised Proposer's Guide, and Cover Sheets, as well as information about the quality of (u,v) coverage over the sky for 2001. General suggestion, and lists of observed sources, and of sources that have been scheduled but not yet observed, can also be inspected.

Proposals can optionally be submitted in their entirety by e-mail, OR the full proposal can be submitted by courier or mail with the Cover Sheets also submitted electronically. As several problems were encountered with the e-mail submissions of the Scientific and Technical Justifications for AO3, it is worth reviewing the general guidelines for submission of proposals by e-mail:

The Cover Sheets should be submitted as the latex text file. The Scientific and Technical Justification should be submitted as a single Adobe postscript file. The Justification should not be submitted by e-mail if essential images or figures are unavailable electronically. Cutting and pasting an image often gives better results than scanning an image in, and scanned images often have to be very large to obtain acceptable resolution. The Justification should be kept to a reasonable size, under ~3 megabytes, in order for it arrive in a timely manner (or at all!). For this reason, electronic submission of color or grey-scale plots should be avoided. Care should also be taken with "bitmap images" (such as scanned images, or conversions from other formats), as these often contain long lines which may be broken in transit. It is strongly recommended that proposals be e-mailed a few days before the deadline so that there is time for notification if there are any problems. If a paper size is specified for printing, use A4. The subject line of the e-mail should contain the PI's family name and several identifying words from the proposal title.

PIs are reminded that complementary ground-only observations, e.g. for snapshots with the ground array at a different frequency during HALCA tracking gaps, require a separate proposal to be submitted to the ground array.

As with previous AOs, an e-mail help-desk is open to answer any questions related to the proposal process -- see the AO for details.

VSOG TEAM

Ian "Max" Avruch's Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoc ended in mid-August, and he has moved on to the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe. Max's many contributions to scheduling, log-file production, file mirroring, satellite operations and general systems administration were of great value to the mission and he is already being greatly missed.

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi