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!