I understand that there are plans to make information publicly available on the real-time status of Rubin Observatory (as in open, closed, bad weather etc) and where it is/will be pointing on a given night.
Can anyone tell me where and how this information will be made available and whether it will be programmatically accessible? Thanks.
OK thanks. Will this data be shared through the Toby system or another platform?
Of course for ground-based observatories this doesn’t take weather or downtime into account, so am I right to understand that sharing real-time observatory status isn’t in the plan?
Will Rubin have webcams sufficient to tell us whether the dome is open?
Hi, Rachel,
The operative requirement is OSS-REQ-0378:
“The nominal survey schedule shall be published at least 24 hours, followed by an updated schedule at least 2 hours, in advance of each observing visit.”
So you can expect updates that take account of intra-night observing conditions to some extent.
As @ktl said, we’ll (at a minimum) use the IVOA standard ObsLocTAP to make the data available. This provides a “pull” model for access to the data. I would say we’re open to discussing additional mechanisms that could be used if the value added to the community is substantial, but we view ObsLocTAP as sufficient to satisfy the construction requirement.
What that means in practice is that there will be a well-documented API endpoint for performing programmatic queries against the observing plan. We will also provide GUI access to querying this data through the RSP Portal. That wasn’t practical to prototype in the static simulated sky of DP0.2, but we’ll be working on deploying that internally during commissioning to make sure it’s working right before it goes public.
I think it’s up to the Integral team to decide whether they’d like to include our data in the Toby application. One of the reasons we’re following the standard is to facilitate such things, and from what I can tell, the standard is well-suited for retrieving the data needed for their application.
EPO intend to have something about near realtime conditions but it is not finalizzed.