SCIMMA web conference Tuesday 10th November at 12:00 PDT
Adam Brazier
Coordinating Time Domain Observing Programs: The TOM Toolkit
and the Observatory Status System
The ability to coordinate observations across multiple telescopes is an
increasingly important capability, particularly for alert-driven time-domain
astrophysics. The workload of managing the flood of targets, observations
and resulting data products can be substantial, and a number of groups have
turned to software tools to assist with this task. These Target and
Observation Manager Systems (TOMs) offer powerful advantages to those teams,
but the development effort required can be substantial. The goal of the
TOM Toolkit project is to provide a highly functional package to enable
astronomers to easily build and customize TOM systems to the needs of their
science. I will describe the Toolkit, and give examples of some of the
science teams making use of it.
But the availability of telescopes for observations is a crucial deciding
factor in any observing program. The recent shutdown of observing
facilities due to the pandemic highlighted the importance of providing
telescope users with this information in real-time. The Observatory
Status System is a prototype of a database-driven system for serving status
information publicly. I will outline the system concept and demonstrate the
implementation so far.