ALMA proposal preparation: Supporting the novice and the expert

The Atacama Large Millimetre Array Observatory (ALMA) is an international collaboration between Europe and North America to build a synthesis radio telescope that will operate at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths. Other papers in this conference outline the overall ALMA Software design and cover various aspects of the software system. In this paper we describe the subsystem that will provide the Astronomer's main interface to observing with ALMA: the Proposal and Observation Preparation subsystem. Tools to handle Proposal and Observing preparation for the world's major telescopes are of course now commonplace (HST, Gemini, VLT, UKIRT, JCMT to mention a few), and we will build on the experience of those tools, but the ALMA telescope will present some novel challenges. We will outline the technical side of the subsystem, how it integrates fully with the overall ALMA software system, and also describe our proposed solutions to the challenges of the user-interface side of the system: the major requirement we have to fully support the needs of advanced users, those expert in sub-millimetre aperture synthesis observing, and novices, who may know very little about the domain.