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!