The University of Toronto built the current Department partially through having private access to the David Dunlap Observatory, which quite remarkably opened as the second largest telescope in the world. Until recently DA operated the University of Toronto Southern Observatory, where the famous supernova was discovered in 1987. There are real benefits - in recruiting quality faculty and students and accomplishing ground-breaking research - that accompany access to private facilities, as many of the top universities have appreciated.
As a concrete first step toward rebuilding guaranteed access to front-line facilities we intend to help build (with faculty, postdoctoral fellow, and student participation) a new instrument for use at the Chile site of OCIW, a proposal supported at the level of $200K by faculty in DA with matching funds from the Dean of Arts and Science and the VP Research. This is the basis of a formal MOU guaranteeing access to the 2.5-m Dupont telescope
The MOU calls for a major investment in instrumentation for the twin 6.5-m Magellan telescopes - telescopes strategically well matched to both current cosmology interests and the ``origins'' thrust of the current plan (§ 2.5.1). Current prospects under discussion for development in the budget range $1.5M include a fully cooled, multi-object infrared spectrograph and a wide field infrared camera. Astronomical Instrumentation Specialists and their students would have a major role in advancing this instrumentation. At the attractive rate of $21K per night, our investment would acquire the equivalent of some 70 nights and allow us to carry out one or two truly major research projects which would be directly competitive with the best initiatives on the Keck telescopes or the European VLT. In the era of the DDIAA (§ 2.7) we would be able to move ahead on such exciting instrumentation. Presently we are requesting OTO funding.