Professional astronomers from any country in the world could apply to use the telescopes operated by NOAO under the NSF's "open skies" policy.

These telescopes, located at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo in the US and Chile respectively, remain in operation under the auspices of the NSF’s NOIRLab.

Telescopes at CTIO include the Victor M. Blanco Telescope (named after astronomer Victor Manuel Blanco in 1995) which employs a wide-field of view CCD (Charge-coupled device), a wide field of view near infrared imager (1-2.5 micrometers) and a multi-object fiber fed spectrograph working at visible wavelengths.

A new wide field imager working at near infrared wavelengths (NEWFIRM) has been deployed to advance studies of galactic star formation, cosmology, and the structure and evolution of galaxies.

One of Gemini's strengths is high angular resolution imaging accomplished through laser guide star adaptive optics.

[1] NOAO was a founding partner in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

Rubin Observatory will have a dedicated wide field imager, and the telescope will cover the entire sky visible from the southern hemisphere approximately every week.

By repeating the observations over and over for ten years, the Rubin Observatory will produce a very deep image of the sky, but it will also detect large numbers of astronomical objects which vary in brightness daily or on longer time scales.

Among other high priorities, the committee responsible for the report concluded:[2] U.S. ground-based optical and infrared facilities...should...be viewed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the astronomical community as a single integrated system drawing on both federal and nonfederal funding sources.

This program, accomplished with the enthusiastic support of the US non federal observatories, supplies the broad US community with some 70 nights of observing time per year.

[3] NOAO continued to work on behalf of the community to effectively shape the System and gain steady, state-of-the-art research capabilities of all apertures for open, merit based science.

NOAO was working with both projects in planning for potential future involvement of the broad US community through operational support funding by the NSF.