User Guide

The Campaign Manager requires a Skynet account to use. Although not open to the public, Skynet is used by tens of thousands of students and professional researchers and institutions every year. Because Skynet has a wide user base with varying degrees of education in astronomy and different skill levels in programming, I built both an easy to use web-interface and a public API.

Components

There are two main components that an observer will interact with when using the Campaign Manager. These include the hardware template and the observation.

Hardware Template

The hardware template is a pre-defined, ordered list of the desired telescopes and filters that are referenced by the CM during an observation. In the back end, this template is parsed into exposure requests where each request consists of a telescope and a filter.

Observation

Observations created with the Campaign Manager are distinguished from other Skynet observations via the event-specific observing parameters that are used to model exposure lengths.

• a desired signal-to-noise ratio per exposure

• an assumed brightness in an observer selected filter at an observer-selected time, post-event

• an assumed temporal index (both power-law and exponential options are available)

• an assumed spectral index

• an assumed dust extinction strength

• a maximum acceptable exposure duration

• an optional sequence delay parameter

See the Adding an Observation page for how to add these parameters. To read about how these observing parameters are used in exposure length modeling, see the Afterglow Exposure Model page.