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.