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It seems that there is nowhere near enough time to go around and as a result a small fraction of the astronomy community is burdened with deciding which proposals get the go ahead. While most astronomers serve their time on such panels — Merrifield and Saari point out that others manage to avoid service. The pair also argue that one person cannot give a pile of one hundred or more applications the attention they deserve. Their solution goes like this…if you want your apochromatic telescopeapochromatic telescope application to be considered, then you must chip-in and assess a few proposals yourself. The results would then be pooled to create a global priority list for a telescope. The most controversial part of the Merrifield-Saari proposal is that the rankings submitted by individual astronomers will be compared to the global ranking — and those whose individual lists are in approximately the same order as the global list would be bumped up a place or two in the ranking. Why? To “reward good refereeing” — the idea being that it would encourage astronomers to score proposals in line with “how the community would rank them, not her personal preferences”. But is there a danger that this would make it even more difficult for more radical proposals to get apochromatic telescopeapochromatic telescope time? this is where we finally get around to defining the position that the telescope is observing. The most important coordinates to report are the Right Ascension and declination. I thought it would be sensible to give these broken into hours/degrees, (arc)minutes and (arc)seconds for maximum flexibility. It would also be possible for a telescope to omit the (arc)minutes/(arc)seconds attributes if they wanted to degrade the reported resolution for some reason. A given ra/dec only make sense if an epoch is also defined. I expect this will normally be J2000 but sometimes telescope systems still work in B1950. I also thought it would be good to have an azimuth and elevation specified in degrees, although these could be optional. From : Justblogme.com
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