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The era of large transient surveys (e.g. Catalina, Pan-STARRS, ZTF, and especially LSST) and multi-messenger astronomy provides many exciting opportunities for new discoveries and understanding of the variable sky. However, the volume of alerts make software automation imperative for object classification, prioritization, scheduling, and data reduction so that the community can get the most science from the new discoveries. Therefore, the NSF's National OIR Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab: Rubin, Gemini, SOAR, CTIO, KPNO, and the Community Science and Data Center) provides a full set of time-domain capabilities. Rubin Observatory's LSST will be the preeminent time-domain survey in the next decade. The ANTARES broker collects and classifies events from ZTF and LSST in the future. NOIRLab is teaming up with the Las Cumbres Observatory to develop tools for automating transient follow-up and to incorporate the participating telescopes into the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON). SOAR now has an "AEON", or queue, mode that makes use of the Las Cumbres scheduler, and has a continuing effort to increase automation of the observing process. Gemini is building new instruments and working on significant software upgrades to improve usability and implement an automatic scheduler. Some data are now being reduced in real-time and is distributed via the NOIRLab and Gemini science archives. This presentation will describe these capabilities and future plans.

As emphasized in the 2020 Decadal Survey report Pathways to Discovery, time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics from both the ground and space is a tremendous challenge and opportunity in the coming decade. The era of large transient surveys (e.g. Catalina, Pan-STARRS, ZTF, Rubin/LSST, Roman) provides many exciting opportunities for new discoveries and understanding of the variable sky. However, the volume of alerts make software automation imperative for object classification, prioritization, scheduling, observing, and data reduction so that the community can get the most science from the new discoveries. Therefore, the NSF's National OIR Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab: Rubin, Gemini, SOAR, CTIO, KPNO, and the Community Science and Data Center) is teaming up with the Las Cumbres Observatory to develop tools for automating transient follow-up and to incorporate the participating telescopes into the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON). SOAR now has an AEON-based queue mode that makes use of the Las Cumbres scheduler; Gemini is working on significant software and instrumentation upgrades. Within the next decade we plan to incorporate other facilities including the CTIO 4m/DECam and the US-ELTs. This poster will describe this project, future plans, and ideas for cooperation and synergies between ground and space-based facilities

Gemini’s Observatory Control System (OCS) is the set of high-level software tools for proposal submission through observation execution, for example, the current Phase I Tool (PIT) and the Observing Tool (OT). While these tools have been improving since the start of science operations in 2000, limitations in their design and technology make them difficult to maintain and to update with the capabilities required for the next decades.

AbstractFreedom's Journal and El Clamor Público: African Americanand Mexican American Cultural Fronts in Nineteenth-Century NewsprintbyArturo Romero Nunez Doctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Marcial González, ChairBoth Freedom's Journal and El Clamor Público represent nineteenth-century milestones because they historically demarcate the inception and terminal points of Manifest Destiny's progress across the continental United States. As such, this project chronicles the cumulative effects of Anglo-based racism on African and Mexican American communities -- a fact that remained not only consistent but also remarkably comparable in these two cases, even though each journal is separated by three thousand miles, twenty-six years, and a different language. Such similarities speak to the numerous and interconnected nineteenth-century practices that collectively undermined the agency and survivability of communities of color, including slavery, Anglo-based free labor, Southern and Southwestern lynching, and filibustering expeditions. Yet Freedom's Journal and El Clamor Público are more than mere reflexive reactions to Anglo-based bigotry; they are historical manuscripts that reflect extraordinary self-determination, and this was revealed within the content of each journal through their coverage of militancy, assimilation-based strategies, and an ever-present insistence on authorial autonomy. Both journals represent what scholars today regard as the respective historic origins for African and Mexican American political and cultural consciousness, and are likewise surprisingly radical -- even by today's standards.By ceaselessly drawing attention to the United States Constitution's guaranteed civil rights, Freedom's Journal and El Clamor Público founded their radicalness on the instinctive supposition that such liberties extended equally and naturally to persons of color. It was this journalistic daring that mostly distinguishes Freedom's Journal and El Clamor Público as not only ahead of their time, but also as relevant texts for the present -- as contemporary reminders of how their struggle for civil rights remain as unresolved today as they did then.

The real-time control systems for the Gemini Telescopes were designed and built in the 1990s using state-of-the-art software tools and operating systems of that time. These systems are in use every night, but they have not been kept up-to-date and are now obsolete and also very labor intensive to support. This led Gemini to engage in a major effort to upgrade the software on its telescope control systems. We are in the process of deploying these systems to operations, and in this paper we review the experience and lessons learned through this process and provide an update on future work on other obsolescence management issues., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain