LST Observations in Cycle 5 / Joint LST-MAGIC Call for Proposals
9 Nov 2026
We are pleased to announce the forthcoming joint LST-MAGIC observation program, which will start on 22 April 2027 and continue through 7 April 2028 (12 observation periods). The deadline for proposal submission is January 22, 2027 at 17:00 UT.
After submission, the proposals will be evaluated by the Time Allocation Committee (TAC), which is composed of members from both the MAGIC and LST collaborations. Principal investigators of the proposals will be notified of the evaluation outcome shortly after the final approval from the MAGIC Collaboration Board and the LST Steering Committee, by the end of March 2027.
Proposal Submission
Proposals for observations with MAGIC and LST will be processed through the “Multi-IACT Proposal Submission System” (MPSS). The MPSS platform allows proposers to enter the team details, target information, requested observational conditions, and specific MAGIC and LST configurations. NOTE: due to recent worldwide PHP security issues, MPSS is currently not available. Instructions on how to proceed for the proposal submission will be provided in due time.
Scientific and technical justifications, along with additional information must be provided using a dedicated LaTeX proposal template which can be downloaded here. Each section in the LaTeX template includes explanatory text, which proposers should read carefully. Please note that proposals will be evaluated “as submitted”, based on the specified configuration. Proposals should be coordinated with the corresponding Physics Working Groups during the process of proposal preparation.
This call accounts for an updated list of Observation Proposal Guidelines, including recommendations provided by the LST Steering Committee and the MAGIC Collaboration Board. These guidelines contain a description of the accepted Telescope configurations, procedures to select the appropriate observation conditions and other information that might help in the preparation of your proposal.
External authors
For MAGIC-only proposals external scientists may act as Principal Investigators (PIs) or co-Investigators (co-Is).
For LST-only proposals scientists that are not LST authors can only participate as co-Is. This includes MAGIC-only members, members of the CTAO scientific community, and researchers not affiliated with any of these collaborations interested in incorporating VHE gamma-ray observations into their projects,
For joint MAGIC-LST proposals, scientists who are neither MAGIC members nor LST authors can only participate as co-Is.
In addition to the PI of the proposal, people responsible for the data handling from each used instrument need to be specified as MAGIC/LST PI in the proposal form. The MAGIC PI needs to be a MAGIC member, LST PI needs to be an LST author.
For both LST-only and joint MAGIC-LST proposals, scientists that are not LST members need to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement with the LST collaboration.
External scientists should get in contact with the TAC chairs (Josefa Becerra - jbecerra@iac.es - and Pol Bordas - pbordas@fqa.ub.edu -) as soon as possible, but in any case before December 14, 2026 to verify whether the proposed observations have been conducted or are planned as part of an existing project. To enhance feasibility, details of the proposed observations should be discussed with MAGIC/LST scientists before submission.
The announcement of this call is also available at the public MAGIC Github space, and will also be posted on the MAGIC webpage and the CTAO-LST web-page. These pages also contain some useful information and tools for the proposal preparation. For LST-1 in particular, a jupyter notebook with the instrument performance and observation simulations tools is available in the latest release of cta-lstchain.