Gary Davis

Title: The UK telescopes on Mauna Kea: breaking news and future prospects

Abstract: For over two decades, the United Kingdom has operated two 
highly-productive telescopes on Mauna Kea: UKIRT and the JCMT. Both 
have been through major transformations in recent years. UKIRT has 
evolved from a general-purpose facility offering a comprehensive suite 
of capabilities to a tightly-focussed survey telescope, with WFCAM as 
its sole instrument and UKIDSS as its dominant programme. For the 
JCMT, the SCUBA-2 instrument is in the final stages of commissioning 
and will be released to the community at the end of September, at 
which point the partner countries will embark on a new programme 
called the JCMT Legacy Survey. In this presentation I will describe 
these evolutionary changes and the prospects for the future of both 
observatories