Adding a Template

Define the telescopes and filters to be used

To add a hardware template, the observer can navigate to My Observatory in the main navigation bar near the top of the Skynet homepage after logging in. This will display a dropdown pane. Click on Optical Observing. From there, there is a small navigation pane in the upper right of the page. Click on the Add Campaign Template option.

Selecting Filters

The observer’s first step in creating a template is selecting the desired astronomical filters for the observation. Available filters include Sloan and Johnson/Cousins as well as narrowband, special purpose, and astrophotography filters. Once the desired filters have been selected, the observer can click next.

Selecting Telescopes

The observer is then prompted to select the desired telescopes. In addition to the list of available telescopes, the observer is presented with an option to automatically add new telescopes as they become available. If this option is selected, the CM will add any new telescopes, along with the filters that were selected in the previous step, that the user has been granted access to that are not in the hardware template.

As an example, if the observer only had access to PROMPT-1 and PROMPT-2 at the time of creating the hardware template, but was granted access to PROMPT-3 at some later time, then the CM would add PROMPT-3 to the template and schedule exposures on all three telescopes at the time of the observation.

Final Modifications

After selecting the desired telescopes and filters, the observer is directed to a new web page containing a table that presents the telescope and filter combinations (see above). If a particular telescope/filter combination does not exist, i.e., the filter is not installed on the given telescope, then the table entry is populated with a green plus sign. This gives the observer the option to add the combination to the template even if it does not exist.

If the filter is installed on the telescope at the time of the observation, then the CM will schedule exposures using the combination. If the filter is still not installed, then the CM will simply ignore the combination when scheduling exposures. This option removes the need for the observer to constantly monitor which filters are installed on the Skynet telescopes. Instead, they simply create a template with their desired telescopes and filters, and the CM figures out which are possible combinations at observation time.