NextAstro For General Users

NextAstronomy is a subscription-based organisation, which provides users access to robotic telescopes from around the world, giving users the ability to engage authentically with astronomy.

Have you ever wanted to:

• make a colour image of a galaxy?
• observe a planet around another star?
• conduct real astronomy research?

A subscription to NextAstro will allow you to access robotic telescopes from around the world to create astronomical colour images, and conduct research into exoplanets, stars, galaxies and much more.

There are various subscription levels, and each level of subscription provides a certain amount of time on telescopes and access to various analysis tools. You are able to rent time on a telescope or perform advanced data analysis using NexTokens.

If you are a beginner but are not sure about things — it is true, there is a lot of things to not be sure about at the beginning! — the Starter Subscription allows you to dip your toes in the water and see if you like what you see! You get enough tokens to take a few colour images per month as well as access to our data centre to play with and download your image. See if you like it… you can always upgrade! This level allows you to take some great colour images, which may be all you want :)

If you are a teacher and want to introduce this in your class, we have tools to help you do it and a Classroom Subscription to allow you to essentially give each student their own ‘starter’ subscription with 2 hours of telescope time and access to the various tools for a year. They receive similar privileges as the starter subscription. There are also teacher specific tools to monitor their usage as well as classroom curriculum material available in our Moodle to use. This is only available to school level teachers.

The Standard Subscription is our workhorse subscription. You get a solid amount of tokens per month. Enough for a reasonably large project each month. You get access to the calendar scheduler and can access and use other people’s data as well as your own. Some of the variable star and exoplanet analysis tools and mosaicing tools also become available to you. To drive your learning with the telescopes, you get access to our standard entry level courses.

Once you have cut your teeth on the Standard subscription (or you already know what you want!), we have our higher level subscriptions. Observer Subscription gets a large amount of tokens per month, allows you to upload files from outside the network to the archive to use the tools there, are allowed to book real time slots as well as free access to research courses!

Premium Subscriptions get a huge amount of tokens and the cheapest per token purchase rate of all subscriptions. They have access to all the courses and all of the extended data access tools and use NexTokens for computational tasks at a reduced rate.