Unveiling the Hidden Universe

Imaging and polarimetry with TolTEC has the promise of linking up large scale measurements by instruments such as Planck, ACT, and SPT with the detailed investigations offered by ALMA. It is the sheer combination of sensitivity and angular resolution that makes these observations so powerful.

Astronomers not directly associated with the Large Millimeter Telescope institutions can be a part of the TolTEC Public Legacy Surveys that we will carry out starting in 2022.


TolTEC commissioning has begun in summer 2022. The TolTEC Science Team has collectively come up with a set of commissioning proposals that test out various observing modes of the system. Take a look at the potential commissioning target list. All commissioning data products will be publicly available once they pass quality assurance.


Those interested in proposing TolTEC observations will want to use the TolTEC Observation Planner to make an estimate of the required observing time. The ObsPlanner is currently set up with our best understanding of the instrument performance. But of course this is evolving over time as we implement improvements and continue to estimate the sensitivities we measured in July 2022. All this to say, the model behind the planner is sophisticated, but so far the data constraining the model is still weak by comparison. Our hope is to provide a conservative estimate of the observing times required to do a particular project. But we encourage users to be judicious in their padding of the requested observing times in their proposals.

For those interested in a more general description of how TolTEC will be used as a camera on the telescope, take a look at the Using TolTEC page on this website. This describes some of our observing modes as well as some of the overhead considerations.


Below we highlight some of the major surveys and survey science we hope to do. The unique capabilities of TolTEC allow the instrument to be used is a wide variety of studies that span nearly all of astronomy.