On January 30, 2024, Allegro – in collaboration with JWST colleagues – organized its first Netherlands JWST-Allegro Science Day at Kapteyn Institute, in Groningen. The Joint Science Day was inspired by the recent introduction of “Joint Proposals” at ALMA and other major observatories and was aimed to inspire collaborations while highlighting already existing scientific synergies.

The event was a great success, with ~ 50 registered participants and an incredible lineup of speakers presenting ALMA, JWST data but also in many cases both in the same talk. Talks ranged from astrochemistry, the high-z universe, to long baseline observations of gravitational lenses, and studies of nearby galaxies and planet forming disks.  Invited speakers were Prof. Karina Caputi (Kaptyen) and Dr. Łukasz Tychoniec (Leiden) who spoke about high redshift galaxies and proto-stellar systems, respectively, in both cases demonstrating the power of combining information from both instruments. Dr. Martin Zwaan (ESO) was invited to speak about ALMA news and the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) that has recently kicked off, offering a detailed timeline and explanation of upcoming capabilities.

Another great highlight of the day was the opportunity to visit the NOVA labs where the new ALMA Band 2 cartridges are currently being assembled. This was a very exciting opportunity for many students and postdocs to get in touch with the technology being developed in the Netherlands and was an inspirational demonstration of the many contributions from the Dutch community to ALMA. Finally, our Allegro-JWST Science Day was a great way to meet our colleagues from various institutes in person again, to chat over coffee and lunch about new ideas and future visions. We would like to thank Kapteyn for hosting, and all our participants for making it such a fun day!  

The Allegro team will host the ALMA Cycle 9 Proposal Preparation Workshop on March 28th, 2022. You should not miss this workshop if you are planning to write an observing proposal for the coming cycles of the ALMA telescope! The registration deadline is Monday, March 21st 2022.

We plan to have presentations/talks to explain the brand new capabilities offered for the new ALMA cycle, the Observing Tool, and how to make simulation of ALMA observations which could make your science case stronger. For newcomers, we will also have a presentation about ALMA use cases to inspire proposal ideas. In addition, we will present overviews about the Dual Anonymous procedure and the Distributed Peer Review process.

In fact, all proposals will be reviewed using the dual anonymous procedure, and for this new call, proposals requesting less than 50 hours on the 12-m Array, and less than 150 hours with the 7-m antennas, will be reviewed through the distributed peer review system.

The long baselines configurations are back in the list of array configurations for Cycle 9. With that, minimum and maximum baselines offered are 0.16 and 16.2 km, respectively. In addition, high frequency observations with long baselines can now be requested.

Moreover, new for this new cycle is the possibility to request VLBI observations of Continuum in Band 7, and VLBI Spectral Line observations in Band 3, as well as localised Solar mapping scans in bands 3, 5, 6 and 7 with Total Power antennas.
For more details, check the Cycle 9 pre-announcement!