Will there be a live feed of the telescope schedule during operations?

Science Data Q&A
#1

Hi,

Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, but I was wondering whether there are plans for a live feed of the telescope schedule during operations, and I can’t find an answer in online documentation to which I have access.

This came up in a discussion of cross-matching between the positions of transient events in the alert stream and external catalogues. Clearly, if we knew where the telescope would be pointing some time in advance it would be possible to pre-fetch data from other catalogues in the relevant fields and, so, greatly speed up the cross-match procedure. Presumably changing weather conditions, etc, could perturb the schedule at short notice, but it would be good to know what information might be available in real-time during operations.

Many thanks

Bob Mann

#2

See the Observatory System Specifications, LSE-30, https://docushare.lsst.org/docushare/dsweb/Get/Version-53126/lse30_OSS_rel14_20180828.pdf#page=24, requirement OSS-REQ-0378, “Advanced Publishing of Scheduler Sequence”: “The scheduling of the observing sequence lasting at least 2 hours shall be published in advance of each observing visit.”

Also see the Data Management System Design, LDM-148, https://docushare.lsst.org/docushare/dsweb/Get/Version-52533/LDM-148.pdf#page=23, section 5.1.2, “Planned Observation Publication”: “This service receives telemetry from the OCS describing the next visit location and the telescope scheduler’s predictions of its future observations. It publishes these as an unauthenticated, globally-accessible web service comprising both a web page for human inspection and a web API for usage by automated tools.”

#3

Many thanks for that prompt reply, K-T; much appreciated…and apologies for not seeing that in LDM-148.

Bob