Nick MacDonald is at Berkeley's Space Science Lab today working with DESI's Claire Poppett, Tim Miller, and Mike Lampton on FOBOS design. I think he brought some fiber with him!

Nice conversation today with Caltech IPAC about expanding the W. M. Keck Observatory archive (KOA) for FOBOS. We want to automate cross referencing of panoramic photometry for optimized target allocation, program definition, and serving of data products. Also in the time-domain.

Woohoo! We now have a FOBOS exposure time calculator. Thanks Kyle Westfall. Let the yearning for your FOBOS science begin!

In addition to single fibers and multiple IFUs, we're exploring a 3rd FOBOS targeting mode: A 30''-wide monolithic IFU. Would look something this 1641-fiber bundle (from Sloan Digital Sky Surveys's LVM design).

Very excited to have John O'Meara visiting us in Santa Cruz today. Should we show him the new logo?

FOBOS just got a new logo...

We will be talking to @LSST folks about FOBOS synergies in a few minutes!

fobos.ucolick.org The power may be out in California but the brand new FOBOS website has just powered on!

We have a proposal draft! Still doing some fine-tuning and then off to the Red Team for review...

Draft proposal sent out to the Red Team internal review... Woohoo!

Excited about key programs: faint spectroscopy for massive galaxy / dark energy work; ultra-deep IFU maps of z=2 CGM *in emission*; IGM tomography (no doubt!); and 100,000 stars in the M31 disk and satellites, IFUs on young star clusters. Wow...

Asst. Professor search is starting at UCSC Astronomy & Astrophysics: recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF00766

Grateful to our Red Team reviewers who provided excellent and valuable feedback on our MSIP draft. We're in the homestretch now!

Ah, NSF Fastlane.. you make us nostalgic for the late-90's internet. When a mistimed click on the back button could doom everything. It's fun to write words like "innovative" and "state-of-the-art" into a 20-year-old text field that can't flow text without chopping the lines.

The MSIP pre-proposal is in, just in time for the holidays! Will NSF put a little something in our stockings?

Excited about cosmology and galaxy probes with small-scale clustering. The bane is "fiber collisions." DESI collision radius is ~63'' but for FOBOS Starbugs, it's only 12''. #FiberCollisions

So excited to have been invited to submit a full MSIP proposal! Due date is May 6th. The only problem is how to type with all your fingers crossed...?

We are joining #Strike4BlackLives and #shutdownSTEM today and taking time to educate ourselves about anti-Black racism, injustice, and violence against Black lives. We seek to find, support, and build meaningful tools for change.

IR-FOBOS, anyone? Excited to be part of the W. M. Keck Observatory IR spectroscopy workshop today and think big with Emily Martin and Shelley Wright...

We now have a complete prototype of the FOBOS blue channel camera, thanks to the PI’s 7-year-old. In-lab testing begins...