If you have a management plan, you aren’t required to participate in this. You aren’t required to share your scope at all! But if you do, we present an intriguing mechanism to make good use of your latent spare telescope time for yourself and for others.

A good example is an exoplanet transit. Perhaps it is winter and you have a very long night… 11 hours…. Perfect to catch that 5 hour long transit that organised itself perfectly into the middle of your observing eve. Thank you random chance! Now you do need to get an hour coming into the observation and an hour coming out. Thats fine. So you drag a 7 hour calendar event to catch that exoplanet transit. Your scope is now set up to observe and you can go to bed! But what about the other 4 hours left over? Thats certainly not long enough to catch a different exoplanet transit …. And you really aren’t interested in anything else….. So you leave Ne(x)tWork sharing on and leave it up to the system to fill in any blanks with other people’s observations.

You awaken suddenly to the sound of birds…. Damn! Slept in! Running downstairs to your backyard (or onto your webcam) to check the observatory has shut. Of course it has, the system does that automatically. Ok, you check the nightly report email and it shows that your exoplanet transit was observed and your processed files are ready to deal with. But… whats this?!? 3.2 of the 4 spare hours were taken up by other people on the Ne(x)tWork…. That gives you credit on your account that can redeemed in telescope time or cash! The other 0.8 spare hours were taken up by collecting data for another telescope network for free using a plugin to our code and you have received some time on their network as well! All of this happened while you were asleep!

As part of our software and management plan, we intend to support plugins to other networks as well as provide our own. Ours, Ne(x)tWork, is a token based system using “NexTokens”. We charge people NexTokens for telescope time on the Ne(x)tWork, so it is only right that we compensate you in NexTokens for your telescope time if we use it. This itself brings an incentive for you to leave your scope in operation even on nights that you may not be using it, may not have a target of interest or just don’t have the time to plan anything. Our management software allows you to set preferences as to how to prioritise different networks. If you have made a formal agreement with a network to provide a specific fraction of your time, say 20%, then the management software can make sure you do provide this commitment… but also that you do not overcommit! You can set your Ne(x)tWork percentage to a specific amount or let it fill up any space as you see fit.

If you would like to try this out, we are currently using this at various scopes and would be happy for more people to come onboard!

We have a couple of other articles that outline what the standard Ne(x)tWork telescopes can do and be made to do and to be constructed. These are focussed on more on schools (link) and private observatories (link) that sit somewhere in the range between amateur and professional. For a university or research institution, much of what has been said applies to a these more professional institutional settings. There it is not a teacher but a research scientist or professional who is dealing with the running of the institution observatory. For a university who are using their observatory, at least partially, for engaging their students, much of what has been said in the other articles about staffing and approaches and what we can provide apply here equally.

Beyond this usage, we can also connect research telescopes to our network and manage them as well. They can be entirely private or, to some specified degree, partly or fully publicly visible. All of the data acquisition, reduction and provision for a ‘private managed observatory’ (link to article) applies here also. However, we can take this further upon request and consultation.

Many of the uses of telescopes for schools and private users are typically standard imaging or photometry with relatively straightforward requests. For research, the requirements can be as varied as the scientific questions themselves! We can extend our system to accommodate largely any data request structure or pattern within reason as well as creation of custom dataproducts. There would likely be a one-off setup cost for a custom approach and may or may not fall under a standard management plan depending on the complexity of the approach. This will need to be quoted on a case-by-case basis. Some of the potential custom setups include:

• Performing an all-sky imaging and photometry survey with automated reduction of dataproducts crossmatched to calibration catalouges.
• Monitoring a series of galaxies again and again looking for supernovae
• Responding to TOO requests from a variety of TOO alerts and brokers
• Automated Exoplanet observing from a list of given targets or target brokers
• Monitoring of a series of sources over time.
• Tracking near-earth objects
• Running transient surveys in an area of the sky.

As the code we use is open source and we are the main developers, we can deep dive into as low a level of the control, acquisition and reduction software as is necessary for your application. We can also customise the delivery, sorting and provision of dataproducts. We can also design custom automated analysis software to further process your data into a format that gets your closer to answer your scientific question or making your dataset complete and robust.

If you are interested in such a more extended approach to observatory management, please get in touch with us!

There are those of us who enjoy the challenge of building something from scratch, spending hours engineering hardware, software and processes together to get an observatory working the way they like it. A broken piece of equipment, a misbehaving piece of code, a non-optimal procedure…. these are not negatives to such people but invitations to intellectual and engineering curiosity experiences. How do we know? We are them! We understand the attraction! …. But this isn’t everyone, but it is many of the people who successfully run their own observatories. Most observatories are quite custom-designed, even when they are largely off the shelf hardware and software. The joy is found in the observatory project itself.

Of course, these are caricatures and there is no such clear cut division, but there are those of us for whom an observatory is not the end, but the means. A means to collect 100 hours of photons using narrowband filters hunting a faint nebula, a means to collect every transit one can of an exoplanet in order to try and detect unknown planets through timing variations, a means to hopefully try and spot a supernovae exploding before anyone else or even a means to engage others in the field of astronomy (see the school observatories article).

If you are interested in the ‘means’ end of things – or you want to make maximum use of your observatory when you do not have time to be in direct control of it – then joining the Ne(x)tWork is likely the most fluid and stress-free way you will find to achieve these goals. We are some of the the main authors and contributors of observatory control, weather monitoring and image reduction pipelines specifically for entirely automated observatories. You can set your observation schedule months in advance and leave it to us to automate and monitor your observatory for you as well as provide your data in calibrated form, fully platesolved, photometered and stacked (amongst many other things). Rather than just calendar projects, you can also set up more flexible schedules to get many objects and let the system organise it for you (e.g. observe all of these objects once a night when you can). You can also control your telescope directly as well. All of this largely happens through a straightforward HTTP site frontend.

You can have your observatory on the Ne(x)tWork and purely run it for yourself as your own private observatory. But you can also allow others to control your observatory if you like – either directly, through the calendar or through the scheduler. You can control how much time others can use on your scope. In doing so, you are able to use other people’s telescopes who may have a weather, timezone or hemisphere advantage. Ever wanted to take a big mosaic of m31? Then share some time and use a telescope in California and let the Cailfornians take their image of Eta Carinae on their shared time.

Prefer to sleep than stay up all night with your scope? Or even go away camping for the month? Leave it in our hands. We monitor all observatories centrally and will jump onto your system as soon as feasible if we detect a fault. We have automated weather control systems, but we will monitor the weather at given sites every night and make manual decisions if we decide that it is absolutely not safe to open. Rather than lose sleep, let our system help you achieve your astronomical goals.

Our code is tried and tested with professional observatories in the United States and Australia. It is designed for those interested in the ‘ends’ and not the ‘means’. The ‘means’ – after the observatory is set up, functioning and powered – is the Ne(x)tWork. The ‘ends’ are:

• Automated collection of bias, dark, flat calibration files, construction of stacked calibrations, variance arrays and bad pixel maps.
• High quality automated reduction and stacking of all images complying with modern professional image quality and fits header standards.
• Provision of data on a central server able to be downloaded or synced to your computer automatically.
• Automated weather monitoring and observatory safety decision making
• Automated commissioning of an observatory. The software automatically determines the optimal settings for many observatory properties from measurement, rather than from human tweaking.
• Be able to explicitly calendar specific times and dates of observations in an easy drag’n’drop calender
• Be able to ask the Ne(x)tWork to automatically schedule a series of observations of all different shapes, sizes and types on your observatory
• Be able to share time on your scope with others and be able to access time on others’ scopes.
• Be able to utilise your telescope through a shift responsive online user interface as opposed to a problematic remote desktop connection.
• Be able to offer your telescopes for random TOO (Target of Opportunity) requests – e.g. Gamma-ray bursts, nova, supernova, kilonova events that need fast search data.
• Benefit from a system that has very low bandwidth requirements to run, allowing use of a telescope at sites where internet may be a problem. Most communication between the user and the scope is via very small instruction transfers.
• Suggest and be happy to see new features arrive in relatively short order. As we connect the observatories centrally, we tend to push the latest production (or development if you like living on the edge a bit) versions to all sites.
• Wake up in the morning and find that your observatory had a bug or fault during the night…. But that we had fixed it by jumping on your telescope computer while you slept! Each observatory provides a nightly summary for each coherent piece of observing equipment and also each enclosure, whether that is a dome or a roof.

Essentially, swap your foreboding experience of looking on your harddrive at Terabytes of data in the morning wondering “What on EARTH am I going to do now??” to finding that all your data is ready to roll, whether that is making a beautiful colour image from the professional-standard reduced images or observing an exoplanet transit or monitoring a variable star from the professional-standard photometry.

If you already have an observatory and it is functioning, it is highly likely that joining it to the Ne(x)tWork is relatively straightforward. It does not involve removing the system you currently are using. In fact, there is no reason that you could not have both systems on the same computer. Our experience is that once the Ne(x)tWork software is on there, other software tends not to be used….. but they can certainly exist harmoniously together if you so desire.

Please get in contact with us and let us know you are interested. The setup for our software on your computer is a free service we provide.

It is fairly common to hear about schools with observatories that are sitting on campus unused and gathering cobwebs and rust. The general theme of the story is less a hero’s journey and more a hero’s departure. The observatory initially gets placed on campus through much expenditure of donated or school funds over more time than most people expected but primarily driven by the motivation of a single staff member at the school, usually a teacher. Much like life, nothing lasts forever and a teacher’s tenure at a given school lasts a significantly great deal less than forever. Generally the end of the story is “Teacher X went onto another school/retired and then nobody used the observatory anymore” — the hero’s departure. If you are one of those schools, we want to hear from YOU! Rehabilitating school observatories is central to our goals.

But lets think more about what happened during the journey of the observatory to the eventual departure. To run a school observatory requires quite a significant amount of effort over time. Things to consider include:

• How are the students going to access and use the telescope?
• If students are using it remotely, who is going to monitor and organise that usage?
• How do our students look at objects in the opposite hemisphere? Or during the daytime in class?
• Is it possible to rehabilitate our current observatory? Or do you build a new one?
• How do students access and analyse the data?

If the use of the telescope is only on-campus, at night-time, then this – generally – means the observatory may only be used a few nights a year. It usually implies teacher overtime (and usually a single specific teacher again and again) and a lot of safety considerations and forms. The solution to this is to provide direct access to the telescope somehow to the students. Again, who is organising and monitoring this usage? That same teacher probably. No matter how passionate the teacher, at some point that teacher is going to have to mark and do lesson plans and be at parent-teacher evenings and – rare though it may be – take some personal time off. The distribution of teacher workload versus student usage is also quite inconvenient. Precisely when students might like or need to use the telescope – during school term – largely overlaps when the teacher is at their busiest. Conversely during the holidays the students and teachers are equally nowhere to be seen.

With proper management, the school observatory can be open and collecting photons every clear night for all users. But that proper management cannot happen within the workload of a single person at the school usually. That is where the NextAstro system comes in. We monitor and control your telescope through our software and take care of it centrally. Our automated systems can open and close your observatory and allow direct and indirect control of the telescope without danger to any part of the observatory itself. We will also manually – as in a human looks at it and decides – monitor the likelihood of danger, storms or rain at your observatory that evening and set it to absolute shutdown if necessary. We can also monitor and remotely bugfix problems at the observatory – at least those that are not necessary to be physically present. Engaging us to undertake this for your school allows your teachers to be free to do what they originally wanted the observatory to do — inspire, engage and educate your students!

There are a few different aspects to consider about the sky at your observatory that may lead you to similar conclusions as we have gotten to! The most obvious is the weather. The sky can be blanketed with clouds – sometimes dropping water (hopefully on the observatory roof!). Thats the obvious one. This means that if your student wants to get an image that evening, it is not possible. With direct use, that means the student has missed out on their opportunity to get their image. If this use is part of a class, then getting their data is delayed which means activities in the classroom get delayed and teachers (and students) have a harder time in the classroom trying to keep synchronized together in the limitations of the timeframe on which the curriculum material is being provided. There are solutions to this.

Instead of the student directly using the telescope, with our system, they can schedule their observation in a queue to be observed. The telescope will then automatically attempt to observe their object when the roof is open and the sky is clear and dark. Students can still directly use the telescope and can still schedule an observation at a specific time (this is useful for some types of observation) but for students who don’t mind when their image is taken, this facilitates them getting their data easily. This is especially true for observations at 3am in the morning!

But, in reality, many schools are in coastal cities that can be clouded out for a week or in tropical areas where it can be raining for longer! If you have the privilege of being in a dark, dry, high, remote or rural school this may not be as much of a problem…. But if the school observatory is connected to the NextWork, a collaboration of school, university and private observatories, the students’ request can, if you allow it, be shared out to another observatory that can get the data for them and likewise your observatory can help out other teachers when they need to get data. This collaboration facilitates fast and rapid data collection for students. If you can imagine you might have 100 students who are doing astronomy for 3 weeks in a given grade and they may all need observations in a single week. Thats a lot for your single observatory! But it is not a lot for a Ne(x)tWork of telescopes.

The other consideration is… your observatory can’t see the other northern/southern hemisphere. Australia cannot see the closest galaxy, Andromeda, and never can (not quite true but true enough, it is very low in the sky). This is usually something students are disappointed in. Also, students can only use the telescope directly at nighttime whereas classes (usually) are in the daytime. With the NextWork, you can access telescopes in the opposite hemisphere (at this point largely between Australia and the United States) to see, request and observe objects in the other hemisphere. It is also possible to use telescopes in the United States in the afternoon in Australia and use telescopes in Australia in the morning in the United States. As more scopes get added in the West of Australia and the East of the USA (contact us if this is you!) and in other countries around the globe, this timeframe expands.

While we do rehabilitate older existing equipment, we can also refurbish the equipment as well as consult on the construction of new observatories or expansions. Before relegating your current observatory to the school skip bin, contact us first! Some pieces of equipment age terribly. This is particularly true of cameras just because technology is rapidly developing there but an older optical tube and mirrors can be perfectly fine and as long as the mount points and tracks adequately this can be perfectly serviceable. So please contact us for consulting to make your investment in a new observatory a strategic one!

As we use custom observatory code that we are the main developers on, we can also usually creatively work around seemingly not working or underperforming older equipment. Within reason, this can be provided free as part of the management contract. There are many pieces of equipment we will politely not name here that have been very difficult to automate in the past that we have liberated with our software. It may be the case that your observatory might be fine aside from one or two pieces of equipment where you should target your expenditure to achieve your goals. As we don’t actually sell the equipment, we have no vested interest in guiding you down the garden path.

Now that you have an observatory, it can be pointed at the sky and students can request images from it (and potentially others) then what? How do the students get their data? Here is the other problem a typical school observatory (and realistically most observatories) have – what do you do with the giant pile of data that comes out of the telescope that is now on the computer harddrive? This is another problem NextAstro solves. All images from the scopes are calibrated, cleaned, measured, packaged and made available for students to access either online or on your local network or both. What then? Then that is a topic for another article! But the gist is that we provide curriculum material, self-paced courses for teachers and students, a NextAstro high school astronomy club as well as professional development for teachers. Read more about it on the site or in the article/s here!

One of the most wonderful things about astronomy is it’s accessibility. “Doing” astronomy can be done in a way that “Doing” chemistry, physics or geology cannot. In chemistry – whatever the elements or molecules you may be playing around with or examining – you need to be in a particular place to handle the sample or do the experiment. In physics, a lot of what you can do uses very precise tools (although there are some things, like muon detectors!). Geology is very similar to astronomy in that it is a very observational science… and it usually is combined together in school curricula worldwide … but the observational science itself is largely done in the field.

Astronomy used to be similar to these other sciences. Astronomers used to have to travel long distances to invert their sleeping schedules and work night shifts for a week at a telescope site. The better the telescope, likely the further they’d travel and the more inhospitable, albeit romantic, and oxygen deprived the site. Nowadays this is not the case. For most research telescopes, access to observing is through the internet. If it is a very large telescope, there are usually engineers on site working as the astronomer is observing but if it is merely large or smaller, they are usually operated autonomously with an engineer perhaps on call for safety reasons. This means for even the most professional telescopes, researchers access them remotely from their home or office and the smaller the telescope, the more straightforward this remote access can be.

This means that primary data can be gathered directly by anyone who has access to telescopes which, through NextAstro, you can! Students can gather data to undertake relatively small projects up to very open-ended projects with these scopes. There are some considerations to make with each one, but it is entirely possible to undertake Research Experience with real Telescopes whether that be in undergraduate level, high school level or sometimes even at the middle school level! It is also possible to do research as a member of the public.

We are not the only group that provides experiences like this, although we collaborate and share with many other groups that do. Over the years, we have learnt what to do and what not to do and what works and what might not and what doesn’t. We do continue to learn. We offer, through our online learning management system, specific courses surrounding particular topics.

The core topics are:

• Double Stars
• Variable Stars, particularly RR Lyrae
• Exoplanets
• Open clusters

The difficult part usually of the research experience is actually figuring out what question it is that you want to answer. The actual mechanics of the research can be the simpler part. If you are entering the field for the first time then you likely do not have the background experience and contextual knowledge to know what questions are interesting to science. And if you don’t have some practical experience, it would be tricky to know how involved a particular approach might be or how long it might take. The four areas above are clear areas within which students and new researchers can make valid, useful, contributions to astronomical research. Double Stars are the most straightforward, Variable Stars and Open Clusters are a bit more involved but also involve more interesting physics about stars, Exoplanets is conceptually relatively straightforward but it is by far the most tricky and time intensive to collect data for.

Three of the four topics the data collection can be relatively swift, usually within a week or two, which can fit within the timeframe of a semester or term ( 8 to 12 weeks ). The one that does not, but a topic of interest to many students, is Exoplanets. This one takes some planning and data collection ahead of time as an exoplanet transit event may only happen once a week and that time may be cloudy. But the others are relatively straightforward. We recommend setting up data collection for Exoplanets about six months before the start of a term-long (8 to 12 week) research experience. For a nine month or year long research experience, Exoplanets are a fine topic to undertake.

For those who want to stretch further and attempt their own open-ended research topic, we can support this as well and help with the design, implementation and direction of the project and advise on whether it may or may not be achievable within a given framework or timeframe. As this is a bit more involved and customised, this is a larger investment on our side, which we are happy to do!

Many of the research experiences that conclude, although not required, can result in publications by students in various journals. We outline some of the articles we have been involved with in the past on our publication page here. For double stars, these are contributions to discovering the orbits of stars that are orbiting around each other over time. For RR Lyraes, these studies contribute to our capacity to measure distances in astronomy, For exoplanets, this allows us to refine our estimates of when planets transits to help space telescopes and potentially discover other planets. For Open Clusters, the research helps us better understand stellar evolution throughout the universe.

If you, or your students, want to participate in such research, please contact us!

All three of the founders of NextAstro have long experience in trying to enable students to get their own images and make their own discoveries using Robotic Telescopes. In particular, how do you do this at scale (Fitzgerald et al. 2014, Gomez & Fitzgerald 2017) with teachers who, even when keen, can find it difficult to address the various impediments to in-class usage of bringing the technology into the classroom (Fitzgerald et al. 2019).

There are curriculum limitations (Salimpour et al. 2020) but also curriculum opportunities (Salimpour, Fitzgerald & Hollow 2024). However, currently the number of teachers actually taking up this opportunity is dwarfed by the amount of students in the world! (Yen, Fitzgerald & Salimpour, in press)

How do we bring robotic telescopes to classroom teaching? Essentially we need to make it easier and more attractive to do it this way than what we usually do.

Where there has been a lot of success around the world have been with those positively inclined early adopter teachers mentioned in the 2019 paper above, even with such predisposed teachers, there are limits that we come up against. And for Chemistry teachers these are doubly and for Biology teachers triply and for out-of-field teachers quadruply so.

Some of the factors that must be overcome to do astronomy in the classroom are listed below. Many of these are not just astronomy specific but apply to bringing anything similar into the classroom. And many of the issues can make it readily apparent why these opportunities, in the past, have been preferentially more successful in higher resourced private schools than in a general school.

• Sufficient professional development opportunities to learn the new approach.
• Capacity to organise the school schedule and class time.
• Capacity to take risks within the school culture
• Ability to take a different direction through the mandated syllabus or curriculum
• Being in a school that values STEM or astronomy in particular
• Access to reliable internet
• Access to I.T. people to address software issues

It can be seen above that these tend to be issues that are more available to teachers from schools that are more resourced than others and, in a matthew (“rich get richer”) effect this compounds as teachers who have more training and experience in the classroom become more proficient and confident in undertaking classroom astronomy.

While we have a lot of success with such teachers, we feel it is also our mission to support teachers who may not be so privileged or even particularly interested in the content area. In contrast to a physics teacher who may have a passion for astronomy, the general majority high school science teacher is more likely to have the following attributes:

• Is a general science teacher, not a physics specialist
• Does not know much about astronomy compared to their actual interest area
• Is most likely biology or chemistry trained.
• Does not find the astronomy part of the curriculum enticing
• Requires support to teach astronomy better
• Has three weeks every year to teach it
• Has about one week (of evenings or weekends) to prepare for it.
• Does not have the free time to fiddle with new software and techniques
• Does not have the capacity to install software or do anything particularly technical to students computers
• Is unlikely to be in a school with a particular focus on STEM or Astronomy.

How do we tackle this at NextAstro? How do we provide solutions to such a (potentially) daunting problem? Well, it is certainly not an entirely dire situation, there are many solutions. For instance, the year levels we are particularly interested in is that area before the last two years of high school (although perhaps a little earlier as well) where students are mature and adept enough but are not yet under higher pressure and may have not picked the direction of their senior years yet. It is also this area of the curriculum that, worldwide, tends to contain curriculum statements that are attractive and amenable to getting “pretty pictures” with telescopes to address the curriculum (Salimpour 2018).

Our research also recommends extending current curriculum into some “missing areas” of curriculum (Salimpour, Fitzgerald & Hollow 2024) that are not directly covered but necessary for a full general layperson’s understanding of the universe they live in, shown below. While these are currently suggestions (although hopefully over the next decades they are more adopted) about emphasis (rather than addition) in the curriculum, they are also able to be adapted into an interpretation of the current curriculum statements to make this area more coherent to teach.

We can provide professional development, training, mentoring, curriculum materials and telescope access for you and your students.

Our other area of particular focus to support those students who have decided (hopefully with our help!) to continue on in science into physics in their last two years of high school. This is a higher stakes situation but also a much more homogenous situation. Even more than lower high school, the topics in Senior Physics do tend to be very similar worldwide.

Preliminary results of our research show that students would be more likely to do physics if it was done in the context of astronomy and space sciences and that this effect is more prominent for females than males. As such, we have designed an approach to the Year 11/12 course – currently aligned to the Victorian and NSW curriculum – that covers the content of Senior Physics but as much within an astronomy and space science context as possible.

There are also many opportunities in various curriculum around the world for students to undertake extended projects of one manner or another. These tend to be more heterogenous but include things such as the NSW Science Extension (link) in year 11/12, Victorian Depth Studies, research projects in the International Baccaleureate or just during an astronomy elective. Some of these may be suited to one of our research projects and we are also available to mentor and guide through a larger curriculum area too!