About

The Scheduler Visualization provides a snapshot of the currently scheduled observations across LCO’s global telescope network. It displays a 48-hour window of the schedule centered around the current time, indicated by a vertical red line. The realized schedule of past tasks appears to the left of the red line and the current schedule of future tasks appears to its right. All times are displayed in UTC.

The vertical axis lists the telescopes within the network, organized by site. The name of each telescope listed includes the site code, the enclosure, and the name of the telescope itself. For example, “lsc.domb.1m0a” refers to a 1-meter telescope in Cerro Tololo, Chile (lsc), housed in Dome B. Telescopes that are not currently scheduled by LCO’s scheduling algorithm are colored dark gray, as indicated in the legend. The list of telescopes at a given site can be collapsed by clicking on the site label. Data is retrieved behind the scenes at 5 minute intervals and, if the “Auto refresh” box is checked, the site will refresh every 5 minutes.

The Scheduler Visualization also provides this same visualization of the schedule for a single site for a window of one day into the past to seven days into the future. For example, to access this view for the site code coj, navigate to /site/coj/.

Functionalities

The timeline can be zoomed in and out and will pan left and right with click and drag. Hovering the cursor over blocks in the timeline displays a tracking number (if one has been assigned) and the percentage of the block that completed successfully (if the block is in the past). Hovering the cursor over weather events or scheduled downtime displays the type of weather event recorded or the reason for downtime, respectively. Hovering the cursor over the legend entries displays further description.

Registered user functionalities

Users can log in to the Scheduler Visualization using their existing username and password registered in the Observing Portal. Once successfully logged in, the username will be displayed in the upper right corner of the page next to a “Sign out” button. Once logged in, if a user has any projects assigned to him or her, these projects will be highlighted in pink and additional information will be displayed while hovering the cursor over these blocks. Clicking on any of these blocks will direct the user to that block in the Observing Portal. Note that users must be logged in to both the Observing Portal and the Scheduler Visualization to utilize this click-thru functionality. For an internal LCO user, Ctrl+click or Alt+click on a block belonging to that user’s project will direct him or her to log in to the Observation Portal (LCO's internal database of queued observations) to view additional details regarding that block.

Help

If you are a new user of the LCO network, information about the telescopes, instruments, data handling and quality, scheduling and other technical aspects of the network is available on the observatory capabilities pages.

If you require additional support, you may contact science support at science-support@lco.global. For inquiries about particular observation requests, please include the tracking and request numbers in your email.