The Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC)

Once entered, your name, address, e-mail, phone numbers and language preference, English or French, are automatically used for future proposals. Be sure to update your registration if any of this information changes (including your language preference).

The registration form also provides a text box in which you can enter your favourite personal LaTeX definitions. Once saved, these will automatically be included in any LaTeX files produced by the proposal generation software. Note, however, that we can NOT guarantee that one of your LaTeX definitions will not conflict with a previously defined variable.

After registering you can enter your User ID and Password to access the system. You then choose to edit or delete one of your proposals which you have previously saved, or start a new proposal. POOPSY has been designed to handle proposals for several telescopes so be sure to select the appropriate site for your new proposal! 

A number of action buttons appear at the bottom of the menu on the left-hand side of each Web page. These allow you to perform some essential functions:

• The Save Changes button will save any information you have entered on the current page. You should press this button before you leave any page unless you do not want to save your changes.
• The Undo Changes button allows you to revert back to the saved verion if you wish to discard the changes you have made since the last time you pressed the "Save Changes" button.
• The Preview Proposal button retrieves your proposal information from the proposal database, LaTeX's it, and checks for errors. If no errors are detected links are then provided which enable you to preview your proposal as a postscript or PDF file. You can also download a LaTeX file containing the current observing proposal information, whether or not errors have been detected. This LaTeX file contains both the .sty and .tex information needed to produce a complete proposal on your local system. (We recommend that you delete any existing .sty files from the directory in which the retrieved .tex file resides before running LaTeX. ) You can use this file to edit the abstract, scientific justification, references, technical justification, summary of other recent time allocations, and experimental design (for large proposals) offline. You then use the "Upload LaTeX" button discussed below to copy this new information back into the proposal database.
• The Upload LaTeX button is used to upload a current LaTeX proposal form from your own computer to the proposal database system. From this file, the abstract, scientific justification, references, technical justification, summary of other recent time allocations, and experimental design (for large proposals) will be extracted and saved in the database. All previous entries for these sections will be lost, so use with caution! All other information within the LaTeX file is ignored when the file is uploaded. Note that the LaTeX file uploaded in this manner must have been generated by POOPSY and retrieved using the "Preview Proposal" button discussed above.
• The Submit Proposal button will formally submit your proposal, but only if no LaTeX errors have been generated by the pipeline. If errors have been generated, or the proposal is incomplete, you will be provided a summary of the errors detected. If a proposal is successfully generated, you will be asked to read a disclaimer and then "sign" your proposal by clicking a second submission button. The proposal is then forwarded to the appropriate location and you should receive an e-mail confirming receipt of the proposal within a few minutes of submission.