The Las Cumbres Observatory operates a fleet of robotically controlled telescopes currently two 2m, nine 1m, and ten 0.4m telescopes, distributed amongst six sites covering both hemispheres. Telescopes of an aperture class are equipped with an identical set of optical imagers, and those data are subsequently processed by a common pipeline (BANZAI). The telescopes operate without direct human supervision, and assessing the daily and long-term scientific productivity of the fleet of telescopes and instruments poses an operational challenge. One key operational metric of a telescope/instrument system is throughput. We present a method of long-term performance monitoring based on nightly science observations: For every image taken in matching filters and within the footprint of the PANSTARRS DR1 catalog we derive a photometric zeropoint, which is a good proxy for system throughput. This dataset of over 250000 data points enables us to answer questions about general throughput degradation trends, and how individual telescopes perform at the various sites. This particular metric is useful to plan the effort level for on-site support and to prioritize the cleaning and re-aluminizing schedule of telescope optics and mirrors respectively.

We review the fault tracking system used by Subaru Telescope operators during night observation, from first light in 1998 to present. Over the years, there was an evolution of format, features and software that culminated in a major revision in 2017. The current revision is LAMP-based using MySQL and PHP, and includes all past faults, pictures and comments. We attempted assigning faults to in-house experts, maintaining a status for each fault from initial report to well-considered solution, multi-language support, displays in both HTML and simple text format, and promotion of more successful solutions over less successful solutions to the same fault. We succeeded in full text search for whole words and substrings, multiple search criteria, and categorization of one fault to two separate subsystems. In the current revision, emphasis was placed on removing obsolete or unused data structures, providing in-memory tabs of the most recently used fault/solutions without repetitive queries, and adding Like/Dislike buttons with cumulative totals for suggesting the most successful fault/solutions across all operators. The current Subaru Fault Tracking System (FATS) is composed of 1440 fault/solutions, 198 pictures, 2453 comments, and is often the first and only resource required in support of night trouble.

The Unit Telescopes (UT) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), La Silla Paranal Observatory, are aging beautifully and delivering outstanding performances to the interfacing instruments.

Nevertheless, the introduction of 2^nd and 3^rd generation instruments comes with the demand of better, more continuous monitoring of key, high level performance.

While some of these demands cannot be met without restoring the commissioning cofiguration, a lot can be done by using the technical and science sensors distributed across the observatory for operational purposes.

This paper means to give an overview of the status quo and illustrate what developments are in sight for the mid-term future.

Recently, the Science Operations department at the ESO-Paranal Observatory went through a series of changes, the one with the most impact goes by the name "SciOps 2.0", where staff changed the way they follow their daily work. In parallel to this development, a thorough analysis of the processes involved in the daytime coordination of Science Operations tasks led us to identify the need for an integrated task manager software [2]. In this contribution, we summarize the development process for such a tool (called "Dynamit"), the methodology used, and how it came to be from an idea in paper to a full production custom-made operations tool. This is a follow-up to the paper [2] mentioned above.

Alignment between the primary mirror of the telescope and wide field corrector (WFC) is necessary for Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) ,which is the next instrument for Subaru telescope in Hawaii. From 6 defocused star images we can align the optical axis of wide field corrector to primary mirror's optical axis with required accuracy.

The MetOp-SG 3MI mission is part of the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG), an Earth observation Program for Operational Meteorology from Low Earth Orbit. It consists of two multi-spectral cameras, one operating in VNIR and one in SWIR. With 13 spectral channels between 410nm and 2130nm, including polarized channels, the instrument covers a semi-field of view of 57°. Due to tight stray-light specifications, on-ground calibration and post-processing correction are required. This paper covers the stray-light correction and calibration methods. The correction is indeed based on the on-ground measurement of Spatial Point Source Transmittance (SPST) maps. Due to the limited amount of maps which can actually be calibrated within a reasonable amount of time, an interpolation method was developed to deduce the stray-light behavior in the whole field of view of the instrument. Furthermore, dynamic range decomposition was required during the acquisition of the maps to get a high signal to noise ratio. Ray-tracing data from the 3MI optical model were used to evaluate the performance of the correction algorithm, including the contribution of SPST maps interpolation and acquisition errors.

Thorium-Argon hollow cathode lamps are commonly used as wavelength calibration lamps for high-resolution astronomical spectrographs (e.g. the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES)). They have been instrumental in supporting high precision work such as the search for extra-solar planets using the radial-velocity method. However, several years ago astronomers found that the quality of commercial Th-Ar lamps had deteriorated, when new lamps showed a “forest” of lines at low intensity levels obscuring faint atomic thorium lines rendering them useless for wavelength calibration in some regions. Based on information provided by the manufacturers the presence of molecular emission from thorium oxides has been suspected as the likely cause of this problem. We have now conclusively identified the observed emission bands as being due to strong molecular bands of ThO, confirming the source of the contamination of the hollow cathode lamps.

We have recorded spectra of new Th-Ar lamps showing contamination using the high-resolution echelle spectrograph at the University of Wisconsin and ESO’s new Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) spectrograph in order to determine the positions of the ThO lines. We shall present our initial analyses of these spectra, describing the wavelength regions most affected, their dependence on the lamp current, and measurements of the ThO line positions.

Time domain science forms an increasing fraction of astronomical programs at many facilities. Synoptic and targeted observing modes of transient, varying, and moving sources rely on precise clocks to provide the underlying time tags. Often precision is mistaken for accuracy, or the precise time signals never reach the instrumentation in the first place. We will discuss issues of deploying a stable high-precision GNSS clock on a remote mountaintop, and of conveying the resulting time signals to a computer in a way that permits hardware timestamping of the camera shutter (or equivalent) rather than the arbitrary delays encountered with non-real-time data acquisition software. Strengths and limitations of the Network Time Protocol will be reviewed. Timekeeping infrastructure deployed for the Catalina Sky Survey will serve as an example.

The transient universe is fast becoming one of the most important research areas in astronomy. Finding objects that change, either quickly or periodically, has opened up new understanding of the cosmos around us, and brought up new questions that require further investigation. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has been developed to observe as much of the sky as possible at a rapid rate, in order to expand the regime of time domain measurement to shorter intervals and detect changes in the sky more quickly. ZTF is a fully automated system, composed of the Samuel Oschin 48-inch (1.2m) telescope at Palomar Observatory (P48), the mosaic camera constructed by Caltech, a filter exchange system, associated sensors and electrical systems, and the Robotic Observing Software (ROS) that controls the operation of the entire system. P48 is a 70 year old telescope that has been upgraded with new hardware, electronics, and a modern telescope control system to allow it to move quickly and accurately across the sky under robotic control. The ZTF mosaic camera is a custom system composed of 16 6Kx6K pixel CCDs, creating a mosaic camera with over 576 million pixels that can image 47 square degrees down to a magnitude of 20.5 in a 30 second exposure. The filter exchange system uses a Kuka robotic arm to grab the 400x450mm filters out of a storage closet and place them onto the front of the mosaic camera, where they are held in place by electromagnets and locking pins. A full sensor system monitors the health of the camera dewar and environment of the observatory; a separate weather station monitors the outside environment. Other subsystems control the motion of the Hexapod that the mosaic camera is mounted on, the top end shutter, and remote switching of power, Managing all of these subsystems is ROS, which is the automated control software that runs ZTF observations. ROS is based on the Robo-AO control system, with improved automation procedures and expanded capabilities to handle the operations required for ZTF. ROS consists of 31 separate software daemons spread across 5 computer systems (4 to control the mosaic camera, 1 for robotic operation); the robotic control daemon is able to manage all daemons, as well as start and stop their operation as necessary. Watchdog daemons intervene in case of robotic system problems, and each daemon has an internal watchdog that can fix or kill the daemon in case of difficulties; if a daemon dies the robotic system automatically restarts it. ROS controls the start of observations and morning shut down, handles weather monitoring and safely stopping in case of bad weather, and responds to problems in the observing sequence by fixing them or stopping operations and sending a message for help. All calibration measurements are done automatically at the beginning of the night; if the calibrations are interrupted they are completed after observations finish in the morning. A queue system determines the observation priority and revises the order of observations dynamically to optimize observational efficiency. ROS is able to operate with less than 15 second overhead between each standard ZTF observation (with a 7.5 degree slew); this is achieved by reading out thee mosaic camera during telescope slew, then transferring and writing FITS data files during the next exposure. FITS headers are kept synchronized through daemons that gather all relevant FITS header information and distribute that to the camera computers. ROS is able to produce more than 80 mosaic science images per hour in standard survey mode; each mosaic is a total of 380MB compressed, so the system produces more than 30GB of data on disk per hour that have to be transferred off the mountain. A new data transfer system synchronizes the compressed FITS data files to the data analysis servers in Pasadena, CA in parallel with the observing system; images are in place for the data analysis pipelines in less than a minute after the ZTF shutter closes. This presentation will discuss the development and execution of the ZTF observing software, as well as analyze the observational behavior and efficiency of the system during the first few months of on-sky science observations.

The South African astronomical community together with the international SALT community recently completed a process to detail a science strategy for SALT, the 10m international telescope that SAAO operates. After six years of science operations, the telescope is a very cost-effective large telescope science producer. The strategy was adopted by the SALT Board, and has already resulted in funding choices for the next stage of instrumentation. The SALT strategy intertwines with that of the SAAO and South African optical astronomy in general. This paper outlines the process followed, the main motivations and plans for the next stage, including risks and challenges. This paper in particular concentrates on the plans to making SAAO/SALT a major player in time domain astrophysics, one of three adopted strategic science focus areas. Plans include a novel design for a high-efficiency spectrograph serving transient follow-up, for which South Africa is well positioned; advanced software aiming to make the whole mountain-top operate as a single transient machine; feasibility studies into revolutionizing SALT observations by utilizing the primary mirror's hundreds of square degree size uncorrected field-of-view. Other SPIE papers in this meeting describe these and other developments at SALT and SAAO in more detail

With the advent of large-scale time-domain surveys such as the LSST, there is a strong desire for the 4-m SOAR Telescope to be able to respond efficiently and effectively to transient alerts. Enabling the required capabilities at SOAR will also support a greater variety of science programs than conventional telescope scheduling. These capabilities are best deployed with SOAR acting as one of several telescopes responding to alerts and supporting time domain programs. We outline how this might be done if SOAR is included as a node in the Las Cumbres Observatory network, at least part-time. This allows SOAR to make use of extensive existing software infrastructure, while adding a larger aperture to the existing network. Participation of SOAR also serves as a pathfinder for participation of other large telescopes in an evolved LCO network. The overall workflow is outlined. Required interfaces are described. Finally, the initial development efforts with this goal in mind are outlined.

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project aimed at detecting optical counterparts to gravitational wave sources. The prototype instrument was inaugurated in July 2017 on La Palma in the Canary Islands. We describe the GOTO Telescope Control System (G-TeCS), a custom robotic control system written in Python which autonomously manages the telescope hardware and nightly operations. The system comprises of multiple independent control daemons, which are supervised by a master control program known as the "pilot". Observations are decided by a "just-in-time" scheduler, which instructs the pilot what to observe in real time and provides quick follow-up of transient events.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an operating optical survey aimed at understanding the accelerating expansion of the universe using four complementary methods: weak gravitational lensing, galaxy cluster counts, baryon acoustic oscillations, and Type Ia supernovae. To perform the 5000 sq-degree wide field and 30 sq-degree supernova surveys, the DES Collaboration built the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square-degree, 570-Megapixel CCD camera that was installed at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). DES has completed its third observing season out of a nominal five. This paper describes DES “Year 4” (Y4) and “Year 5” (Y5), the survey strategy, an outline of the survey operations procedures, the efficiency of operations and the causes of lost observing time. It provides details about the quality of these two-season's data, a summary of the overall status, and plans for the final survey season.

LOFAR is the World’s largest radio telescope which combines signals from 51 phased array antenna stations distributed in The Netherlands and across Europe. It covers the largely unexplored low-frequency range from 10- 240 MHz and provides several unique observing capabilities. Every second, tens of gigabytes of data flow through a massive ICT infrastructure from the stations to the correlation facility located in the north of The Netherlands. The post-correlator raw data is further processed on a supercomputer through a variety of processing pipelines. Final data products are shared with the community through a distributed long-term archive system, which hosts the largest astronomical data collection to date. In order to exploit the new frequency regime with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, LOFAR faces several non-trivial technical and operational challenges. These are presented and discussed in this paper, along with the important lessons learned which will be important reference for next generation observing facilities.

ESPRESSO, the next generation ESO VLT high-resolution ultra-stable spectrograph, after the successful Preliminary Acceptance Europe held at the integration site of the Observatory of Geneva, has been re-integrated at Paranal and started its commissioning activities at the end of 2017. One critical aspect for ESPRESSO future operations, compared with other instruments currently running at ESO, is the way it will be operated which poses several constraints on its data flow. ESPRESSO has been conceived and developed as a “truly science-grade products generating machine” thanks to its fixed format and long-term stability. In addition to the Data Reduction Software (DRS), a Data Analysis Software (DAS), developed within the standard ESO Data Flow System, will be provided to the users – a novelty for the instruments at Paranal. Moreover, ESPRESSO will be fed either by the light of any of the UTs or by the incoherently combined light of up to four UTs, a feature which required a re-thinking of the current Paranal data handling injection schema. In this paper, after describing the main challenges and peculiarities of the ESPRESSO data flow system listed above, we will present the results of the first commissioning activities and the lessons learned to handle data produced by an instrument with such ambitious scientific requirements.

We describe a process for cross-calibrating the effective areas of X-ray telescopes that observe common targets. The targets are not assumed to be "standard candles" in the classic sense, in that the only constraint placed on the source flux is that it is the same for all instruments. We apply a technique developed by Chen et al. (submitted to J. Amer. Stat. Association) that involves a popular statistical method called shrinkage estimation, which effectively reduces the noise in disparate measurements by combining information across common observations. We can then determine effective area correction factors for each instrument that brings all observatories into the best agreement, consistent with prior knowledge of their effective areas. We have preliminary values that characterize systematic uncertainties in effective areas for almost all operational (and some past) X-ray astronomy instruments in bands covering factors of two in photon energy from 0.15 keV to 300 keV. We demonstrate the method with several data sets from Chandra and XMM-Newton.

One basic system requirement for the SKA Project is aimed to providing both a rolled-up and a drilled-down view of the Operational (Health) Status, as well as the State, for each Element. The first one is a performance indicator that must be properly structured in order an operator can understand it. The second one is a logic enumerative that has to contain at least the following values: start-up, shutdown, standby and operational. In this paper an aggregation algorithm, defined for the Health Status of the SKA Telescope Manager (TM) but abstract enough in order to be extended to a generic complex system, is analyzed in terms of the three main indications it has to provide: fully operating, degraded performance, faulty. The analysis shows that the distinction among critical and non-critical components, along with their state and weight on the overall system, is enough to completely achieve a rolled-up view of the system. System architecture only affects the weights, which are the result of a dependability analysis initially performed on the system itself. The aggregation can be applied to selected subsets of components, so providing hints for a drilling-down of the monitoring data, when this is necessary. Finally, using the algorithm to aggregate the states essentially fails: a different approach based on logic relationships will have to be adopted in order to manage states, but to this purpose an important role can be played by the aggregated health status.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory's 27 antenna Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (NRAO VLA) is host to a commensal low frequency system called the VLA Low-band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (VLITE). This system currently records data from 16 of the primary focus 330 MHz feeds during nearly all observing programs that use one of the eight Cassegrain receivers. This type of commensal (or piggy-back) system provides a powerful opportunity to increase the scientific capabilities of an instrument, yet it is accompanied by numerous complexities resulting from lack of control over the observational setup. In this paper we specifically investigate the stability of the instrumental bandpass response as recorded by VLITE. We demonstrate that the bandpass for each antenna is stable for long periods of time. This allows the use of a global bandpass derived from high signal-to-noise ratio observations of reliable calibrators, which may be applied to any dataset. This method avoids the loss of data when a bandpass cannot be calculated because the appropriate calibrators are not observed, not observed for long enough, or when the observations are severely impacted by radio frequency interference. We also demonstrate that monitoring the behavior of the bandpass solutions over time can be a powerful tool to determine intermittent equipment issues, as well as long term changes to the system.

Dedicated diversity and inclusion programs are important tools to utilize in a successful organization. Cross-disciplinary studies show that diversity contributes positively to overall productivity and innovation, in both profit and non-profit sectors. Diverse working groups are capable of producing better science, and creating an inclusive environment is essential to maintaining diversity in the workplace.

This paper first outlines studies of the measured benefits of diversity, and the different ways in which they manifest, in order to emphasize its importance. Demographics data from international astronomy organizations is presented to illustrate the current state of the workforce in observatories and within observatory operations. Finally, a much-needed focus is placed on inclusion in the workplace. We review why creating an inclusive environment is important for the success of maintaining a diverse organization. We discuss how different programs implemented at astronomical observatories contribute to creating an inclusive environment, and detail real-world examples of these efforts taking place in these institutions. The goal is that these strategies can be adapted to benefit other similar organizations.

As diversity continues to grow in astronomy, creating working environments that are equally beneficial to all employees is imperative. Diversity in astronomical observatories is evident in a number of employee characteristics, including gender, race/ethnicity, age.

Since June 2017, ESO has created its Diversity and Inclusion Committee gathering a variety of employees from the different sites, with different backgrounds.

We will focus here on the status of the diversity and the strategies to develop a skilled and diverse operational workforce in the ESO observatories.

Recent studies have shown that the proposal peer review processes employed by a variety of organizations to allocate astronomical telescope time produce outcomes that are systematically biased depending on whether proposal's principal investigator (PI) is a man or a woman. Using Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and Gemini Observatory proposal statistics from Canada over 10 recent proposal cycles, we assess whether or not the mean proposal scores assigned by the National Research Council's (NRC's) Canadian Time Allocation Committee (CanTAC) also correlate significantly with PI sex. Classical t-tests, bootstrap and jackknife replications show that proposals submitted by women were rated significantly worse than those submitted by men. We subdivide the data in order to investigate sex-disaggregated statistics in relation to PI career stage (faculty vs. non-faculty), telescope requested, scientific review panel, observing semester, and the PhD year of faculty PIs. Consistent with the bivariate results, a multivariate regression analysis controlling for other covariates confirmed that PI sex is the only significant predictor of proposal rating scores for the sample as a whole, although differences emerge for proposals submitted by faculty and non-faculty PIs. While further research is needed to explain our results, it is possible that implicit social cognition is at work. NRC and CanTAC have taken steps to mitigate this possibility by altering proposal author lists in order to conceal the PI's identity among co-investigators. We recommend that the impact of this measure on mitigating bias in future observing semesters be quantitatively assessed using statistical techniques such as those employed here.

The James Clerk Maxwell telescope has operated on Maunakea for over thirty years. The Observatory has continually focused on integrated, database driven operations solutions to improve efficiency, data quality and publication productivity. In the past two years, a series of advances have been made to automate the analysis and display of critical Observatory metrics - including detailed project tracking, scheduling and completion, through to a new publications database which provides Observatory scientists with the tools to look critically at the rate of science return as a function of project, instrument, science area and other factors. These new tools will be presented, along with the results of the metrics analysis, and ways such tools can be adapted to other facilities.

The new Keck Observatory Telescope Control System is now deployed for regular operations on Keck 2 and the deployment on both telescopes, Keck 1 and Keck 2, is expected to be completed by the time this paper is published. Two new instruments, KCWI and NIRES, were commissioned with the new control system on Keck 2. The upgrade project was a major undertaking replacing the original software architecture and modules, as well as many obsolete hardware components. During the long testing phase, we discovered deficiencies, which we corrected with modifications of the original design. This paper gives a summary of the achieved performance, the issues involving deploying a new system while remaining in full operation, and lessons learned in design and implementation of such a large system.

SALT is a 10-m class optical telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa, owned by an international consortium and operated in fully queue-scheduled mode by the South African Astronomical Observatory.

Since the start of its science operations in late 2011 and particularly since the start of its integrated operations, all the key metrics have continued to increase at a significant pace, breaking records nearly every semester: program completion, completion levels per priority, number of observed blocks, and publications. In this paper we present an update of all of our performance metrics and the strategic changes that have been and are taking place, in line with the new Strategic Plan for SALT and the SAAO.

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has benefitted greatly by integrating its astronomy and technical operations under one management team since February 2015. Synergies were created in many aspects of operations: joint planning (e.g. shutdowns to minimize downtime and maximize results), asset renewal and development projects. Joint decision making enabled setting of priorities regarding operations, projects and allocating scarce resources to those. Joint budgeting led to cost effectiveness. Joint training and teambuilding exercises improved team spirit. All key metrics improved across the board. This paper describes the processes implemented to achieve better synergy and productivity.

The Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) is one of four instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NIRSpec is developed by ESA with AIRBUS Defence & Space as prime contractor. The calibration of its various observing modes is a fundamental step to achieve the mission science goals and provide users with the best quality data from early on in the mission. Extensive testing of NIRSpec on the ground, aided by a detailed model of the instrument, allow us to derive initial corrections for the foreseeable calibrations. We present a snapshot of the current calibration scheme that will be revisited once JWST is in orbit.

The ESO telescope bibliography (telbib) dates back to 1996. During the 20+ years of its existence, it has undergone many changes. Most importantly, the telbib system has been enhanced to cater to new use cases and demands from its stakeholders. Based on achievements of the past, we will show how a system like telbib can not only stay relevant through the decades, but gain importance, and provide an essential tool for the observatory’s management and the wider user community alike.

This paper is a biennial update on the productivity and impact of observatory publications. The primary scientific output of a telescope is the collection of papers published in refereed journals based on data from that telescope. A telescope's productivity is measured by the number of papers published, while its scientific impact is the sum of each individual paper’s impact as measured quantitatively by the number of citations that the paper receives. The period covered by this paper ifor the years between 2012 and 2016.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is planned for launch in spring 2020. In 2017 and 2018, the operational ground system was exercised by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) operations personnel in the form of three Science Operations Rehearsals (SORs). The SORs exercised and demonstrated routine daily operations, process flows, and rework scenarios. They also provided an inside look at the JWST ground systems capabilities, and provided an opportunity to exercise the software that will be used to create flight products. Documentation of operational procedures were also assessed and updated as needed. We describe the content of those rehearsals and lessons learned along the way.

Optimizing the night time is essential on a site like Maunakea. The mountain offers excellent weather conditions that can be used to observe more programs than most sites in the world. CFHT has been making significant efforts toward optimal usage of the night time, starting in 2000 with the implementation of the Queued Service Observing (QSO) system followed by the installation of the dome vents in 2012 and lastly, the implementation of the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) observing mode in 2013. The QSO-SNR mode is now used by default at CFHT for two of our instruments: MegaCam, a one square degree imager, and ESPaDOnS, a high resolution spectropolarimeter. This paper describes the implementation strategy for each instrument as well as the time saved using this observing mode.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) will each year obtain millions of spectra in the optical to near- infrared, at low (R(see abstract for symbol) 3000) to high (R(see abstract for symbol) 40000) spectral resolution by observing <3000 spectra per pointing via a highly multiplexed fiber-fed system. Key science programs for MSE include black hole reverberation mapping, stellar population analysis of faint galaxies at high redshift, and sub-km/s velocity accuracy for stellar astrophysics.

The architecture of MSE is an assembly of subsystems designed to meet the science requirements and describes what MSE will look like. In this paper we focus on the operations concept of MSE, which describes how to operate a fiber fed, highly multiplexed, dedicated observatory given its architecture and the science requirements.

The operations concept details the phases of operations, from selecting proposals within the science community to distributing back millions of spectra to this community. For each phase, the operations concept describes the tools required to support the science community in their analyses and the operations staff in their work. It also highlights the specific needs related to the complexity of MSE with millions of targets to observe, thousands of fibers to position, and different spectral resolution to use. Finally, the operations concept shows how the science requirements on calibration and observing efficiency can be met.

The Observation Queue Scheduler (OQS) for WEAVE is described in this paper, with particular emphasis on the scheduling algorithm. WEAVE is the new 2-deg field of view multi-object (1000 multiplex) spectroscopy facility (R5000 and R20000) at the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope. The OQS helps to maximize the scientific impact of WEAVE observations by optimising the schedule of the observing blocks, taking into account the science priority, required instrument configuration and observing constraints. On a nightly basis the OQS will assist the observer in creating a flexible queue of suitable observing blocks to be executed. It will be also possible to run a version of the OQS for extended periods of time to provide guidance on the longer-term planning of WEAVE surveys.

The 1.2m Quantum Teleportation Telescope imaging system is a multi-band imaging system with dual channels called ‘red end’ and ‘blue end’. Each channel includes a CCD camera and a filter wheel system, and the blue end contains a focusing system. In order to improve the tracking accuracy, the guiding CCD is designed and deployed. The imaging system studies the mass of the black hole and the structure of AGN by observing the variation of AGN spectral line. In order to improve the observation efficiency, we design and implement a multi-level remote unattended observation and control system. The system adopts the framework of combining RTS2 and EPICS. EPICS is used to realize the individual control of each device. We defined status code and split device properties for debugging purpose or high-level invocating purpose. The EPICS Channel Access is integrated into the RTS2 software and a set of configurations in XML format is designed so that the RTS2 module can find the EPICS application. In the RTS2 layer, we developed a module for the coordinated control of the equipment. The module is responsible for sending instructions to the telescope and the guiding module according to the pre-defined list of observation plans, switching to the corresponding filter, and performing exposure operations. Finally, we developed web service and used web pages as user interface, which makes it convenient for users to control the telescope remotely and complete the observation task.

Efficient scheduling of astronomical surveys is a challenge with an increasing level of complexity as the observation strategies are becoming more sophisticated and operational costs are higher. In general, any kind of astronomical survey requires the execution of a huge number of observations fulfilling several constraints. The fulfillment and optimization of these constraints is a key factor for obtaining an efficient schedule with an adequate exploitation of the resources and with a high scientific return. In this contribution, we present the framework STARS (Scheduling Telescopes as Autonomous Robotic Systems) that computes optimal schedules for a variety of space- and ground-based infrastructures and scientific exploitation plans. STARS provides methods, tools and libraries for the definition of surveys (e.g., objects to observe, features of the objects, observation constraints), the definition of the observatories (e.g., location, number of telescopes, type of telescopes, sub-array configurations), the usage of astronomical calculations (e.g., object coordinates, object elevation, Sun and Moon position, Moon phase), and the application of schedulers (e.g., long-term, short-term) based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and astronomy-based heuristics. In STARS, two main types of schedulers are defined: long-term and short-term. The long-term scheduler is focused on scheduling object observations with a time scope ranging from one night to several months or years. It considers the observation constraints (hard-constraints) that can be predicted beforehand, and it optimizes some objectives (soft constraints) by using GAs. The execution of the long-term scheduler can be time-expensive, but it is not time-critical because it can be run before the start of the telescope operation, so it can be used as a standalone scheduling tool. On the other hand, the short-term scheduler computes in real-time the next observation (or scheduling block) to be executed by optimizing some soft constraints, fulfilling all the hard constraints and by considering all the observations previously executed. The short-term scheduler is time-critical and reacts in less than a second to the changing conditions (weather, errors, delays, targets of opportunity). It uses astronomy-based heuristics to repair the schedule obtained by the long-term scheduler, in order to keep the long-term perspective while avoiding intensive calculations. STARS has been successfully applied in several ground and space-based observatories. It is used to operate the CARMENES instrument (Calar Alto, carmenes.caha.es) and the Joan Oró robotic Telescope (www.oadm.cat). It is used to prototype the mission planning tool for the ARIEL M4-ESA candidate mission, and in prototypes for large ground-based installations, such i.e. the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). Finally, STARS is also being extended to cover multi-observatory coordinated scheduling purposes, under the framework of the EU-H2020 ASTERICS project, and in order to promote multi-messenger science. The coordination of large observatories in the northern and southern hemispheres are used as test cases to evaluate the performance of such an innovative scheduling solution. In this sense, simultaneous observations or minimal time gap between observations are promoted resulting in a challenging and complex optimization problem that will open a new era for the optimal operation of large astrophysical infrastructures.

We discuss a generalised model for representing a telescope of arbitrary complexity as a networked resource that could be scheduled by a remote entity. We describe the five interfaces that enable such a telescope to i) accept authorised projects, ii) receive and update a schedule of observations, iii) report progress of ongoing observations, iv) propagate operational telemetry and v) produce retrievable science products. We are using this model to integrate the SOAR 4.1m into the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCOGT) robotic telescope network, and see it as a general approach that could be applied to other telescopes in the future.

Rapid technology development has opened up exciting new possibilities in astronomy with larger, more sensitive telescopes that cover large frequency ranges. Telescopes have become bigger and more complex, housing multiple instruments and having wide ranging science aims. These technological advances and cheaper internet makes remote collaboration across astronomies, with multi-wavelength astronomy, quick follow-up and network observation strategies, easy to achieve.

In turn, each telescope still has to deal with weather and dynamic conditions on oversubscribed systems. It is thus natural to turn to advanced multi-purpose scheduling software development in order to enhance scientific return in an effort to identify better solutions.

In this paper we present a strawman Python scheduler based on a modular design for scheduling astronomy observations that is easy to adapt to the specific requirements of an observation, but still general enough to optimize in a simple evaluation schema very similar to dynamic scheduling strategies already being used in so many industrial areas.

LMU Munchen operates an astrophysical observatory on Mt. Wendelstein with two telescopes (2m and 40cm, Refs.^1-3) and five instruments (three imagers^4-8 and two spectrographs^{9, 10}) for night time observations. The observatory offers service observations for the astronomy groups of the LMU physics department as well as for their collaborators. Staff and student observers have to be able to adjust observation scheduling to a wide range of observing conditions (often changing several times during an individual night) meeting the demands of very different observation project constraints (background limited, seeing limited, time limited etc.). To meet these requirements we adapted a free bug tracking software (https://www.redmine.org) which was already in place for observatory operations and software development. The tool enables easy communication between, and progress documentation for observers and observing projects leads with only very little administration overhead. Here we describe how we set up the tool and its impact on observations quality.

The diverse and dynamic landscape of services provided by data archives that has recently emerged is in stark contrast with the classical idea of astronomical archives as static, passive repositories whose only goal is to capture, record and preserve forever the assets produced by their observatories. In this new scenario, archives occupy a central role as engines and enablers of the success of the astronomical facilities they support in multiple ways. More specifically, in the case of mature missions and established observatories that have collected large amount of data, archives can be considered new instruments in the own right as they, by favoring re-use and new uses of single or aggregated archival datasets, promote the investigation of regions of the observational parameter space that can otherwise be impractical to access or inaccessible altogether. In this contribution, I will describe how the Chandra Data Archive (CDA) contributes to the final science return of the Chandra mission by focusing on four different areas: maximization of the observational efficiency through contributions to smooth operations of the observatory; collection and curation of a comprehensive mission bibliography; assessment of the scientific impact of the mission by the development of specific metrics; promotion of use of archival data across different astronomical communities. Finally, using the Chandra archive as an example, I will briefly discuss the changes to the roles and priorities of an astronomical archive that are necessary to adjust to the evolving needs of the mission and its constituencies. This work has been supported by NASA under contract NAS 8-03060 to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for operation of the Chandra X-ray Center.

In this paper we present the envisaged setup and changes to the current Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) configuration at the beginning of operations for the James Webb Space Telescope mission. The placing of the observatory at L2 and long periods of autonomous operations mean that observations can be split over several time periods or ‘visits’. Data are processed through standard science data reduction pipelines after arriving at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). We describe how data from visits and pipeline processing lead to the data products that are to be stored in the archives. Most observations will require a number of exposures; we discuss the data associations that will formulate the highest level of pipeline products that will be available in the MAST archive for JWST. The JWST observatory has numerous spectroscopic modes, including integral field units and multiple object spectra which will distinguish it from the Hubble Space Telescope archive. We describe the expected data products and services. Finally, we discuss the links to data analysis software and archive products available for user reprocessing.

The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes^b (MAST), a multi-mission archive that hosts science data products for several NASA missions, has since 2003 solicited collections of processed data, termed High-Level Science Products (HLSPs), from investigators with observing and archive science programs. As of early 2018 there were nearly 130 contributed collections, and the growth rate is expected to accelerate with the start of the TESS^c and JWST^d missions. While the data volume of all HLSP collections is only about 1% of the total volume hosted by MAST, they have an outsized impact on science. The aggregate downloaded volume for a given HLSP collection is typically about 40 times the collection size, and the citation rates for HLSP collections are significantly higher than that for typical observing programs. Yet hosting HLSPs presents special challenges for long-term archives. It is often problematic to obtain sufficient metadata to specify fully the data products without requiring work from potential contributors that may discourage them from sharing their collections. Historically, preparing an HLSP collection for distribution via MAST has been quite time-consuming and often required substantial interaction with the collection contributors. We are creating a more automated workflow and using new technologies for HLSP collection management to improve collection discoverability, simplify the process for the investigator, ease the burden for MAST staff, and shorten the timeframe for publishing HLSPs. This work will also help MAST staff better assess the impact of HLSP collections on science outcomes for hosted mission data.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an all-sky survey mission designed to discover exoplanets around the nearest and brightest stars. The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute will serve as the archive for TESS science data. The services provided by MAST for the TESS mission are to store science data and provide an Archive User Interface for data documentation, search, and retrieval. The TESS mission takes advantage of MAST multi-mission architecture to provide a cost-effective archive that allows integration of TESS data with data from other missions.

The archive of the La Silla Paranal Observatory is a powerful science resource for the ESO astronomical community. It stores both the raw data generated by all ESO instruments and selected processed (science-ready) data. We present the new capabilities and user services that have recently been developed in order to enhance data discovery and usage in the face of the increasing volume and complexity of the archive holdings. Future plans to extend the new services to processed data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) are also discussed.

After 14 years of operations, the Spitzer Space Telescope has over 7800 refereed publications, which are catalogued in the Spitzer Bibliographical Database. After depleting the cryogen onboard in 2009 observatory operations were altered in order to run the mission on a budget totaling less than 1/3 that of the cryogenic mission. These changes included decreasing the number of approved science programs and funding to the community while encouraging very large programs (<1000 hours). We present here insights on how Spitzer's operational changes have altered how people publish the data, and present metrics about data use and re-usage for the entire mission in published papers. Spitzer is a community driven observatory and our observing programs vary in number of hours and number of observations depending on the science, and so a comparison between various methods of presenting publication statistics is discussed.

'What is the science impact of your observatory?' is the dreaded question most observatories face in one way or another. Classically, the number of science papers and citation rates of those papers are presented to show the science impact of an observatory with perhaps some download statistics thrown in for good measure. But a more expansive notion of science impact is needed to assess the most in uential types of science coming from the observatory. This necessarily leads to a deeper and broader look at the science being done with the obser- vatory's data. It encompasses notions of what kinds of observing programs will have long-lasting contributions to astronomy; what serendipitous science is being, or can be, performed with the observatory's archive; what unexpected science topics are being investigated with the observatory's data; or even, which sorts of targets need more exposure time. Observatory bibliographies can provide insight to these questions. In this presentation I will provide examples of how the extensive metadata connected to the Chandra Bibliography is being used to uncover the science impact of the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) within the astronomical community. This work has been supported by NASA under contract NAS 8-03060 to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for operation of the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC).

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious project to build the world's largest radio observatory: a low frequency (50 { 350 MHz) array in Western Australia, and a mid-frequency (0.35 { 15 GHz) array in South Africa. The SKA's Global Headquarters will be at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK. Once in steady-state operations, the SKA will have one of the largest data rates of any research infrastructure in the world. One key challenge for SKA is to manage its digital data they are passed from receptors in the field, through several stages of processing before being delivered. In addition, a global network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) is planned, where advanced data products will be generated and processed for analysis, collaboration, publication and preservation. This paper will describe the operational concept for the SKA and the challenges faced by its distributed operational model. The paper provides an update on the current work leading to the development of a collaborative network of SRCs around the world.

June 9th, 2018 marks the 20^th anniversary of the first light of the INAF-Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. This paper is a resume of the main scientific and technical results obtained with the TNG, together with the history of the telescope, the instruments and the people who allowed for several successes and many lessons learned. We will point out what made the TNG a telescope which still can make competitive research in the large and extremely large size telescopes era.

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT) was successfully launched on June 15th, 2017. It performs broad band X-ray scan survey of the Galactic Plane to detect new black holes and other objects in active states. It also observes X-ray binaries to study their X-ray variabilities. Here we will introduce the Science Operations of Insight-HXMT, which is responsible for collecting and evaluating observation proposals, scheduling observations, and monitoring the working status of the payloads

The Spitzer Space Telescope is executing the ninth year of extended operations beyond its 5.5-year prime mission. The project anticipated a maximum extended mission of about four years when the first mission extension was proposed. The robustness of the observatory hardware and the creativity of the project engineers and scientists in overcoming hurdles to operations has enabled a substantially longer mission lifetime. This has led to more challenges with an aging groundsystem due to resource reductions and decisions made early in the extended mission based on a shorter planned lifetime. We provide an overview of the extended mission phases, challenges met in maintaining and enhancing the science productivity, and what we would have done differently if the extended mission was planned from the start to be nearly twice as long as the prime mission.

The Canada France Hawaii Telescope Corporation (CFHT) plans to repurpose its observatory on the summit of Maunakea and operate a new wide field spectroscopic survey telescope, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE). MSE will upgrade the observatory with a larger 11.25m aperture telescope and equip it with dedicated instrumentation to capitalize on the site, which has some of the best seeing in the northern hemisphere, and offer its user’s community the ability to do transformative science. The knowledge and experience of the current CFHT staff will contribute greatly to the engineering of this new facility.

MSE will reuse the same building and telescope pier as CFHT. However, it will be necessary to upgrade the support pier to accommodate a bigger telescope and replace the current dome since a wider slit opening of 12.5 meters in diameter is needed. Once the project is completed the new facility will be almost indistinguishable on the outside from the current CFHT observatory. MSE will build upon CFHT’s pioneering work in remote operations, with no staff at the observatory during the night, and use modern technologies to reduce daytime maintenance work.

This paper describes the design approach for redeveloping the CFHT facility for MSE including the infrastructure and equipment considerations required to support and facilitate nighttime observations. The building will be designed so existing equipment and infrastructure can be reused wherever possible while meeting new requirement demands. Past experience and lessons learned will be used to create a modern, optimized, and logical layout of the facility. The purpose of this paper is to provide information to readers involved in the MSE project or organizations involved with the redevelopment of an existing observatory facility for a new mission.

PICARD is a mission devoted to solar variability observation, which aims at perpetuating valuable historical time-series of the solar radius. PICARD contains a double program with in-space and on-ground measurements using Ritchey-Chrétien telescopes. The PICARD spacecraft was launched on June 15, 2010, commissioned in-flight in October of the same year, and was retired in April 2014. PICARD ground-based observatory is functional since May 2011 in the Plateau de Calern (France), and is still operational today. We shall give an overview of the PICARD instrumentation and the performances of the existing ground-based telescope. We will also present our current results about solar radius variations after eight years of solar observations.

We review the Gemini Observatory Large and Long Programs (hereafter ‘large programs’ or LLPs) and discuss large program policy and proposal process.. The Gemini Large and Long Programs are Principal Investigator-defined and -driven programs that either require significantly more time than a partner typically approves for a single program, or extend over two to six semesters, or both. The large programs are designed to enable multi-partner collaborative programs, with significant scientific impact, to be reviewed within a single time allocation process.

Uniquely designed with two 8.4m mirrors, a 22.8m interferometric baseline, and the collecting area of an 11.8m telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBTO), has a narrow window of opportunity to exploit its status as the “first” of the ELTs. Prompted by urgency to maximum scientific output during this favorable interval, we undertook a multi-year project to reshape the user experience. The initial stage, implementing a new suite of software to facilitate proposal submission, script creation, binocular planning, and nighttime execution, is nearing completion. Reuse and adaptation of existing software, particularly Gemini Observatory’s cross-platform PIT and OT, proved critical, although as expected, we encountered many challenges presented by our one-of-a-kind binocular design and operations. We hope to leverage our success in the early phases of this project toward further improvement of our science operations model, specifically, augmenting our nighttime operations to include observatory-led observing. We plan to focus this observing mode primarily on instruments that require block scheduling and/or superb and rare conditions such as our newly commissioned GLAO system, ARGOS. In this paper, we outline our workflow, describe lessons learned, and present our resulting software products. We also detail future development toward our ultimate goal, improved efficiency and user interactions throughout every step of the observing experience.

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), a result of the collaborative work of a consortium of European and US institutes, is the only Mid-IR science instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The combination of MIRI0 s sensitivity and angular resolution over the 5-28.5 µm wavelength range will enable investigations into many different science topics, ranging from the local to the high-redshift Universe. The MIRI team has defined and published a set of ”Recommended Strategies” to help observers optimally plan and execute their science programs. Some of these recommendations are generic and applicable to any science case; others are tailored to specific observing modes. Here we summarize key generic recommendations for MIRI observers, with emphasis on detector usage. All this information is available to observers as part of the James Webb Telescope User’s Documentation System and will be updated as needed.¹

NIRSpec is the flagship spectrograph for JWST in the 0.6 to 5.3 micron wavelength range. Observation with the Micro- Shutter Assembly (MSA) for multiobject spectroscopy (MOS) will use configurable shutters to form spectral slits and provide the first space-based MOS capabilities. The NIRSpec Micro-shutter Assembly Target Acquisition (MSATA) is an autonomous target acquisition scheme to acquire and position targets accurately with respect to the spectral slits. The method uses measured centroid positions of reference stars with accurately known relative positions across the target field for this process. MSATA performs not only linear offsets, but any required telescope orient (roll) correction to remove blind-pointing alignment error. The MSATA procedure can be used for most NIRSpec science and will be a prerequisite for most NIRSpec MOS mode observations. Astrometry relating the positions of science targets and candidate reference stars with a relative accuracy of 5 - 10 mas will be needed to deliver the best calibration accuracy of science sources. With this level of planning accuracy, the MSATA procedure should yield a final total pointing accuracy for NIRSpec MOS targets of <20 mas within the preselected 200 mas-wide MSA shutter. Here we present analysis of test cases using simulated datasets that were used to help define and check operations flow for NIRSpec MSATA.

Until recently, users of ESO’s Very Large Telescope had to prepare Observing Blocks (OBs) with a standalone desktop tool. Tool support for automated OB mass production was mostly limited to imaging public surveys. Furthermore, there was no connection between the OB preparation software and other ancillary tools, such as Exposure Time Calculators, finding chart preparation software, and observatory schedule, meaning that users had to re-type the same information in several tools, and could design observations that would be incompatible with the Service Mode schedule. To address these shortcomings, we have implemented a new programming interface (API) and a state-of-the-art web application which provide observers with unprecedented flexibility and promote the usage of instrument and science-case specific tools, from small scripts to full-blown user interfaces. In this paper, we describe the software architecture of our solution, important design concepts and the technology stack adopted. We report on first user experience in both Visitor and Service Mode. We discuss tailored API programming examples, solving specific user requirements, and explain API usage scenarios for the next generation of ESO instruments. Finally, we describe the future evolution of our new approach.

The Paranal Observatory Eavesdropping Mode (POEM) is a web-based application for viewing panels on approved instruments on Paranal. The focus is on the ease of use, confidentiality, and security. As it is entirely web based, no software installation is necessary, apart from a modern, up-to-date browser. Designed to work in parallel with other ESO web-based observing tools, POEM has been officially offered since October 2017. In this talk I shall describe the design of POEM and its application to Paranal science operations and other technical work, and describe the feedback and experience gathered in the first few months of operation. In the second part of the talk, I will present a possible roadmap for remote observing at ESO. These include offering remote observing for telescopes at the La Silla Observatory, and how the next generation of instruments will be operated.

Several challenges will have to be faced by the staff at Paranal Observatory in order to be well prepared for a seamless integration of the ELT in the current VLT operations scheme. The Telescopes and Instruments Operator group (TIO) is already undergoing changes connected with some of the identified technological and operational needs for the ELT. This paper will have detailed information about the current training needs, group structural changes, the current activities using the adopted engineering-TIO [2] (eTIO) scheme and the staffing plan that will have to be applied in order to keep the centralized support of the biggest world infrastructure in astronomy at the time of the ELT, to handle daily science operations for seven different telescopes, the VLT interferometer and twenty-one scientific instruments in parallel.

Given enough exposure time the sensitivity of an astronomical instrument is ultimately limited by systematic errors, and the dominant source of systematic errors for most optical/infrared instruments is imperfect sky subtraction. In turn the limiting factor for sky subtraction accuracy is frequently the accuracy of flat field calibration, making these calibrations critical to the overall performance of the instrument. The Anglo-Australian Telescope’s fibre-fed spectrographs, and in particular the multi-object integral field spectrograph SAMI, are reaching sky subtraction systematic error limits and this has motivated an upgrade to the calibration systems. SAMI and its successor HECTOR are calling for sky subtraction accuracies of at least 0.25%, with a goal of 0.06%, an improvement of 4-17 times. Flat field calibrations can use dark sky, twilight sky or an illuminated screen (‘dome flats’). For multi-object spectrographs such as SAMI recalibration is required for each set of targets. This makes twilight flats impractical as it is impossible to guarantee the availability of clear twilight sky for every configuration. The dark night sky is the ideal calibrator, but the long integration times required result in onerous overheads. What is needed is a dome flat field system accurate enough to replace dark sky flats. To achieve this we have replaced both the existing screen and its illumination system. The effective throughput of optical fibres feeding an instrument vary slightly as their paths change, so high accuracy demands that calibration be done with the telescope in the same position as the science observations. We have applied two new screens to the dome windscreen, either side of the aperture, so that it is possible to move a screen in front of the telescope while in any position. There are two distinct purposes for flat fielding: photometric calibration and sky subtraction. For an ideal telescope these are equivalent but the existence of stray light creates subtle differences, and this has implications for design of the screen.  When the primary purpose is sky subtraction the highest possible accuracy will be achieved with a screen that illuminates the telescope from all the directions that the night sky does. Consequently our screens match the size, shape and relative position of the windscreen aperture. The screens are implemented as Avian D diffuse reflectance coating applied to the dome windscreen itself. Avian D is highly Lambertian, has high reflectance and is durable enough for the observatory environment. The screens must be illuminated uniformly, in terms of spatial variations of both total intensity and spectral energy distribution (SED). We use an array of lamps around the end of the telescope tube. By using LEDs we are able to customise the SED and obtain a signal to noise ratio that is more consistent across wavelengths than is possible with traditional quartz tungsten halogen flat field lamps. We present the design of the new flat field calibration system, explain the main design decisions and discuss results from commissioning. These include comparisons between dome and dark sky flats, and measurements of the sky subtraction accuracy.

MSE is an 11.25m telescope with a 1.5 sq.deg. field of view. It can simultaneously obtain 3249 spectra at R = 3000 from 360−1800nm, and 1083 spectra at R = 40000 in the optical. The large field of view, large number of targets, as well as the use of more than 4000 optical fibres to transport the light from the focal plane to the spectrographs, means that precise and accurate science calibration is difficult but essential to obtaining the science goals. As a large aperture telescope focusing on the faint Universe, precision sky subtraction and spectrophotometry are especially important. Here, we discuss the science calibration requirements, and the adopted calibration strategy, including operational features and hardware, that will enable the successful scientific exploitation of the vast MSE dataset.

We review the multiple changes in Gemini Observatory operations over the past decade, and discuss their effect on scientific productivity. The initial mix of queue and classical programs, allocated by Partner-based Time Allocation Committees (TACs), has evolved to include “Large and Long” programs allocated from a pool by a dedicated TAC, a popular “Fast-turnaround” mode allocated by a novel “proposer review” system, and we are now receiving increasing numbers of visiting instruments, scheduled in blocks. Observations are carried out in queue (service), classical (visitor), and priority visitor (visitors execute both their own observations and the queue) modes. Gemini is already an important facility for following up time-domain discoveries. Looking ahead, Gemini South will be partnered by LSST on Cerro Pachón and both Gemini telescopes will put a significant fraction of observing time into responding to the LSST alert stream; we review Gemini’s positioning to fulfil this role and anticipate additional changes in our operational model, user software and data reduction to accommodate it.

The Gemini Observatory has a strong commitment to meeting the user community's scientific needs. This means providing a strong suite of instruments with broad applicability: those that can handle the largest share of science return as well as more unique instruments, some of which might have narrow scope but potentially high impact. Recognizing that building a new Facility Instrument is expensive and typically takes more than 5 years, we have developed the Visiting Instrument Program, which allows investigators to bring their own innovative instruments to either Gemini telescope. To be accepted, all visiting instruments must demonstrate their competitiveness via the regular time allocation process. The majority of successful instruments are made available to our broader user community within one semester of being commissioned at the telescope. Visiting Instruments are operated by the instrument team while on Gemini, and are not fully integrated to Gemini control and data reduction software. The instrument team is responsible for providing reduced data and/or a data reduction pipeline to PIs when the instrument is made available to the community, as well as providing technical assessments of any community proposals. In any given semester, as many as three Visiting Instruments at each telescope might be listed in the Call for Proposals. The availability of the instrument at either Gemini telescope is determined by popularity with proposers, by pressure from other instruments and programs, and of course by the willingness of the instrument team to allow the use of the instrument at Gemini.

The eight Maunakea Observatories continue to excel and expand but have traditionally been isolated facilities despite their close proximity to each other, with little formal sharing of human or technical resources. This has been changing recently, led by multi-telescope observing time swaps, budget challenges and the shared security pressures of Maunakea summit operations. Over the past two years, a series of Maunakea Operations and Engineering workshops have been held, discussing shared issues and novel ways of resource lending and sharing. The ideas and implementation of the first operations sharing initiatives that resulted will be presented, along with the lessons learned by reviewing the shared experiences of this wide range of highly productive facilities.

Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) of the Carnegie Institution of Science has been operating in Chile for about 50 years, currently operating four main telescopes. Carnegie operates the two 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes on behalf of a partnership that includes a consortium of universities. The Magellan Telescopes were commissioned in 2000 and 2002 and offer the consortium users a suite of twelve instruments. In this paper we will first provide a brief description of the science, technical and administrative structure of the observatory. We will then present an updated review of the Magellan telescopes operations and maintenance. Details on status and performances of the instruments will be given. We will finally cover the operations of the duPont 2.5 meter and Swope 1 meter telescopes including the current and future collaboration with the two hemisphere surveys SDSS-IV and SDSS-V.

The long march of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory to full operation is a long journey, which is both exciting and challenging. Step1 (2014) outlined a six-year plan aimed at optimizing LBTO’s scientific production while mitigating the consequences of the inevitable brought on by the considerable complexity of the telescope and the very diverse nature of the LBTO partnership. Step 2 (2016) focused on the first two years of implementation of this plan, presenting the encountered obstacles (technical, cultural, and political) as well as the commissioning milestones. Step 3 (2018) will give us an opportunity to reflect on the first four years of the plan initially devised nearly five years ago. Significant progress was made and important milestones reached, such as the completion of the first generation instrument commissioning in all their modes, the full use of the telescope in binocular mode for the past eighteen months, the routine observations as a 23-m telescope through nulling and Fizeau interferometry with LBTI, the end of the commissioning phase of the ARGOS ground-layer AO system, or the reshaping of the user experience thanks to a new suite of software. Metrics were developed to track the efficiency of the observatory and its scientific productivity. In spite of these undeniable successes, one must face the fact that some of these progresses were slower than anticipated. Though by no means out of the ordinary, especially at a relatively new observatory pushing technology to its limits with (too?) limited resources, this fact must be analyzed to better prepare for the coming decade with a good dose of realism while keeping great aspirations. After all, the next generation telescopes are late too! In spite of the setbacks (we will talk about them too!) which slowed down the pace of the observatory long march over these past four years, we are preparing an ambitious plan which will make LBT shine in a unique way as a pair of 8-m telescopes and as the first of the ELTs while these ELTs will still be in their construction phase. This new plan, which highlights unique capabilities and includes new instruments and observing modes, will be presented as a conclusion to this presentation.

The MeerKAT radio telescope, with a full 64-dish antenna complement, is expected to be ready for standard operations towards the end of the first quarter of 2018. This includes having an end-to-end operational chain of systems, including antennas, receptors, digitisers, correlators, signal displays, processing pipelines and, control and monitoring interfaces. The MeerKAT telescope is one of the few such systems built following a Systems Engineering process, with lots of technical challenges to make it functional at an operational level.¹ Several large, scientific survey projects are expected to integrate with the MeerKAT operational system as soon as data ows through the system. Lessons learnt during system level integration and engineering debugging are also notable.

The Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) operates a 12m submillimeter wavelength telescope in the high Andes in Chile at 5107 m above sea level since 2006¹. Several steps have been taken to improve the operation efficiency of the facility in the given harsh environmental conditions². The developments in remote control and -sensing allowed in 2017 for the transition to a remote science operations scheme, observing 24/7 from the basecamp control center in San Pedro de Atacama. Also engineering and maintenance is in the transition phase to a similar scheme to minimize presence and activities at the very high site. Instrument control servers allowing remote operation even of heterodyne THz instrumentation, with no compromise on instrument performance, had been developed and proven to reliably work³. The transition to full remote science operations required major hardware upgrades on the antenna drive system and a failsafe remote-control system to ensure the safety of the antenna, the Sun Avoidance System (SAS). We report on the layout, the implementation and on the experience of the first year of this new operations model started in April 2017.

The engineering tasks also are in a transition phase to a scheme that minimizes the presence at the antenna. Daily engineering work at the high site for preventive and corrective maintenance can be reduced when all critical hardware systems are integrated in a remote monitoring and control system. We have started with this in 2015 and have stepwise introduced this new scheme. This required the introduction of redundancies of systems as well as the extension of sensing points and remote-control interfaces, throughout all levels in the project breakdown structure of the telescope and its auxiliary systems. We present examples of theses implemented systems and discuss the concept of redundancies.

The APEX observatory is the smallest ESO site in Chile, incorporated as a department of LPO, the ESO La Silla – Paranal Observatory, within the directorate of Operations (DoO). The work presented will attempt an outline of approaches that can be applied to telescopes exposed to similar environmental conditions as well as to larger and distributed operations such as envisaged for the Paranal Observatory extended by the ELT on Cerro Armazones.

Remotely operated astronomical radio telescope facilities that are spread over a large geographical area demand a new kind of protection from severe weather phenomena such as wind gusts and lightning. Both of these factors pose a unique danger to dish shaped antennas which many radio telescopes are based on. Structural damage can be incurred by severe wind gusts if a dish antenna is not stowed into its minimum wind profile position, and lightning protection might not be at its optimal configuration if the dish is not stowed. Traditionally, anemometers have provided wind information to base stow decisions on. In the case of thunderstorms capable of triggering microburst events however, anemometers do not provide timely enough warning, and their spot measurements are too localised to provide safety for distributed antenna networks.

We discuss our implementation of a near real-time satellite data based severe storm warning system built for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), the methods used to diagnose convective developments, and we will show on a number of examples how well such a satellite based system can work, despite the system inherent time lag. We conclude by discussing future developments and improvements that can be made to the system for deployment with extremely large projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) currently being planned and built in South Africa and Australia that will require monitoring of an area orders of magnitude larger even than we are monitoring today.

Using data products derived from the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) deployed on the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s (JMA) Himawari 8 satellite, we can obtain information on convective developments in the troposphere that are likely to result in dangerous wind gusts. This data is taken in 10 minute intervals and generally available no later than 8 minutes after the observation time, thus providing near real-time information on the weather situation. One additional challenge is the large area covered by the radio interferometers we are operating. In the case of the Australian Square Kilometre Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope in remote West Australia’s Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO), the landmass covers dozens of square kilometers featuring 36 dish antennas of 12m diameter each.

We extend upon the initial analysis on the Evolution of Operations for the Surveys Telescopes at Paranal Observatory (C. Romero et al 2016) and follow on an ongoing Science Operation project. The operational complexity of some of the new generation instruments and facilities, incorporated into Paranal observatory, such as the AOF (Adaptive Optics Facility) will supposed a big challenge for all areas involved, including the operational one. Paranal Science Operation realized that adaptation to the complexity of this new systems, while maintaining the operational mode in vigor and the available resources, were feasible by releasing man power on the Telescope and Instrument Operators group. On this regard, Surveys Telescopes; VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for astronomy) and VST (VLT Survey Telescope) were early identified as candidates to provide the more demanding systems with an additional support operator and since 2016, improvements on Surveys Telescopes (automatization, stabilities, operational panels and screens distribution at the console, among many others) has become a joint effort between MSE (Maintenance, Support and Engineering) and Science Operations, on this effort and as a way to cope with the limited resources, operators has took an important role on the analysis and development of this project. As well as on acquiring experience with the creation of new operational panels plus the maintenance of some operational scripts. Now the dry run for this new operational mode is set for January 2018 and a staff resource for future panels’ modifications is on the way.

After 20 years of operations, the Paranal Observatory has accumulated some experience with maintenance of systems, and has lately adopted the methodology called ‘Maintien en Condition Operationnelle’ (MCO). We will describe and review the practical implementation of this strategy, the tools used, the benefits and challenges as well as practical examples and how it is overall managed. The approach is also a benchmarking exercise for operation of the ESO-ELT in the future.

The calibration hardware system of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is designed to measure two quantities: a telescope's instrumental response function versus wavelength and atmospheric transmission. First of all, a "collimated beam projector," which projects monochromatic light, monitored with a NIST-traceable photodiode, through a mask and a collimating optic onto the telescope, is designed to measure the instrumental response function. This method does not suffer from stray light effects and the reflections/ghosting present when using a flat-field screen illumination, which has a systematic source of uncertainty from uncontrolled reflections. It allows for an independent measurement of the throughput of the telescope's optical train as well as each filter's transmission as a function of position on the primary mirror. Second, CALSPEC stars can be used as calibrated light sources to illuminate the atmosphere and measure its transmission. To produce spectrophotometry necessary to measure the atmosphere's transfer function, we use the telescope's imager with a Ronchi grating in place of a filter to configure it as a low resolution slitless spectrograph. In this paper, we describe this calibration strategy, focusing on results from this prototype system at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) 0.9 meter telescope. We compare the instrumental throughput measurements to nominal values from the vendor. We describe measurements of the atmosphere made via CALSPEC standard stars during the same run.

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre is a fully automated astronomical observatory particularly conceived for carrying out large sky surveys with two unprecedented telescopes of unusually large fields of view: the JST/T250, a 2.55m telescope of 3deg field of view, and the JAST/T80, an 83cm telescope of 2deg field of view. The most immediate objective of the two telescopes for the next years is carrying out two unique photometric surveys of several thousands square degrees, Javalambre Phtometry of the Accelerating universe Survey (J-PAS) and Javalambre Photometry of the Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS), each of them with a wide range of scientific applications, like e.g. large structure cosmology and dark energy, galaxy evolution, supernovae, Milky Way structure, among others. To do that, JST and JAST will be equipped with panoramic cameras under development within the J-PAS collaboration, JPCam and T80Cam respectively, which make use of large format (~ 10k x 10k) CCDs covering the entire focal plane.

This paper describes in detail, from operations point of view, the engineering development of the overall facilities and infrastructures for the robotic observatory and a global overview of current status pinpointing lessons learned in order to boost observatory operations performance achieving scientific targets, maintaining quality requirements but also minimizing resources, material and human resources.

We also briefly introduce the Early Data Release (EDR) of J-PLUS, which is already freely accessible worldwide, and the first scientific papers. Finally, we show the next steps necessary for JST to perform the J-PAS project.

The Wumingshan mountain (Mt. WMS), located in the Grand Shangri-La area of south-west China, has been selected as one of the most potential regions for hosting China's next-generation ground-based large telescopes. Firstly, Mt. WMS has ideal astronomical conditions for both day-time and night-time observations. Comprehensive analysis of remote and on-site long-term meteorological, geological and geographic data suggests that WMS satisfies the strict requirements for an excellent candidate site, through a series of key parameters including average seeing factor ^r0, sky brightness, clear-sky days, precipitable water vapor content (PWVC), refractive index structure constant, atmospheric coherence time, isoplanatic angle and meteorological information etc. Averagely, its daily seeing factor is over 10 cm and its night seeing factor is 0.9 arcsec on ground. The average wind speed is less than 5 m=s. The average normalized PWVC at unit air mass is about 2.5 mm. The average yearly sunshine duration is generally more than 2500 hours. The amount of yearly clear sky days and nights are respectively 250 d and 270 d. The median night sky brightness level is 21.8 mag arcsec^-2. The atmosphere cleanliness is also excellent. Secondly, Mt. WMS possesses the necessary conditions for the establishment of high altitude observatories. Its ridge is at and spreads over 2 km2. The large relative elevation difference in the local terrain, plus the existence of population settlements at low altitude (~2800 m) in the vicinity, substantially reduces the future cost for construction, settlement, and logistics. Its geological structure is stable, and there is virtually no record of geological disaster or inclement weather. The nearby counties have low population density (~5 km^-2) and there have been extensive transportation networks. In October 2014, we initiated a long-term monitoring project in Mt. WMS. We have been collecting data from two monitoring sites for more than three years. Both sites are located about 4700~4800 m above the sea level. Our instruments mainly include the solar and stellar Differential Image Motion Monitors, the Sky Brightness Monitors, the PWVC monitors, the Atmospheric Temperature Fluctuation Monitors, the Multi-wavelength Solar Photometers and robot meterological stations, and so on. There have been a lot of activities within the ASO-G (i.e., CGST and large coronagraph) sites' study since our last reports.^{1, 2} In this paper, we introduce the daily observation, transmission, storage and analysis of the harvested data, and the overall operation, management and technical support of the monitoring platforms.

SALT suffers from the malady of all telescopes and observatories: Having limited resources to retain the functionality of aging equipment. To maximize the effectiveness of the resources available careful consideration must be given to where efforts are focused. This study shows how the fault tracking system at SALT has been optimized using simple web based tools. Graphical representations of the fault data are used so that the user can quickly recognize trends. The system effectively focuses management attention on the areas of the telescope where intervention will deliver the most cost effective drop in downtime. This systemized approach has reduced monthly average downtime from 10.8% to 2.8% over the last three observing semesters.

SALT, in conjunction with the SAAO, has developed and implemented an integrated safety management system. This system complies with the South African Occupational Health and Safety Act. Safety is a standard and very important consideration when the Failure Effects, Maintenance and Critical Analysis are done for current and new operations, designs, sub-system and instruments. Employee health needs special attention since the observatory is located 250 km away from proper hospitals and medical specialists. Since its full implementation, hardly any work-related safety incidents or injuries occurred. This paper details the integrated safety system and its various elements.

The SALT’s 91 primary mirror (PM) segments require annual recoating with aluminum because it is exposed to harsh environmental conditions during telescope operation. Recoating is used as a broad term entailing mirror segment removal, aluminizing and segment installation. Ideally, most large telescope, such as SALT, attempt to use individuals who are professionally educated and trained to handle optics for recoating of their primary mirrors. Unfortunately, South Africa doesn’t have tertiary institutions providing courses in optics or optical engineering. This paper describes how the SALT operations team overcame that challenge and trained and certified personnel, with no tertiary education whatsoever, recruited from the rural community of Sutherland, where SALT is located, by deskilling the individual PM segments handling and recoating tasks.

Weather monitoring has always been an element of observatory operations. For a robotic telescope there is the added complication that software needs to understand the ever changing atmospheric observing conditions in order to respond in real time, continuously balancing the schedule for both facility calibrations (i.e., standard stars) and targeted observations according to the TAC-assigned science priorities. For the Liverpool Telescope, in the past year we have been testing a new multi-threaded approach. We have long operated a single-element, integrated-all-sky, 10 m bolometer on site. To this we have added real-time photometric monitoring of field stars around the science target and analysis of publicly accessible weather satellite images. This gives us three estimates of any night's photometricity; two ground-based looking up through the cloud (optical and thermal IR) and one satellite-based looking down at the observatory. We present a comparison of the results from the different methods and share our experiences selecting between the complementary data sets to support real-time observing decisions.

The Spitzer Space Telescope currently operates in the "Beyond Era", over nine years past an original cryogenic mission. As the astronomy community continues to advance scientific boundaries and push beyond original specifications, the stability of the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) instrument is paramount. The Instrument Team (IST) monitors the pointing accuracy, temperature, and calibration and provides the information in a timely manner to observers. The IRAC IST created a calibration trending web page, available to the general astronomy community, where the team posts updates of three most pertinent scientific stability measures of the IRAC data: calibration, bias, and bad pixels. In addition, photometry and telescope properties from all the staring observations (>1500 as of April 2018) are trended to examine correlations with changes in the age or thermal properties of the telescope. A long, well-sampled baseline established by consistent monitoring outside anomalies and space weather events allows even the smallest changes to be detected.

A threat to all telescopes is possible condensation on its instruments and primary mirror during high humidity conditions. Using too conservative delta dew-point control limits for telescope closure can reduce valuable observing time. SALT recently changed its operational procedure in high humidity conditions to gain as much additional observing time as possible, without subjecting the telescope and its instruments, to the harmful effects of condensation. This paper will describe how the SALT Operations team managed to safely reduce the delta dew-point control limit and thereby gaining valuable observation time without investing significant amounts of money.

WEAVE is the next-generation spectroscopic facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) ^1,2. WEAVE offers multi-object (1000 fibres) and integral-field spectroscopy at two resolutions (R ~ 5000, 20000) over a 2-deg field of view at prime focus and will mainly provide follow up of ground-based (LOFAR) and space-based (GAIA) surveys.

The Observatory Control System (OCS) is responsible for providing the software control and feedback framework through which WEAVE will be operated. This paper summarizes the design of the different OCS subsystems and the interfaces between them and other WEAVE components.

In the remainder of this paper, Section 2 outlines the other WEAVE systems with which the OCS interacts, Section 3 describes the system architecture, Section 4 comments on system-architecture decisions, Section 5 describes the main components of the OCS, Section 6 outlines the life-cycle of an OCS Observing Block and, finally, Section 7 gives an overview of the OCS testing plan.

There have been astronomical observatories on Magdalena Ridge in south-central New Mexico since the late 1960s. Magdalena Ridge is relatively flat, at an average elevation of 10,560 feet (3220 meters) with a north-south length of 3/4 of a mile. In 2000 the Magdalena Ridge Observatory began site testing for two new facilities: a 2.4-meter optical telescope and a 10-element optical interferometer. As part of that testing, meteorological instrumentation was deployed at several locations across the mountain. As a result, we have an 18 year history of regular experience with the environment, including weather and cloud cover data for much of this time period. We present trends in the basic meteorological parameters: temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speeds and directions, and cloud cover. Diurnal temperatures ranges vary from 15 C° in the spring when it is largest to 10 C° in the summer months when it is smallest. Barometric pressure varies more in the spring and fall than in the summer. Annual rain fall levels vary greatly with an average of about 10 inches of rain per year. The snow amounts have traditionally been very hard to measure as the area is partly above the tree line and wind-blown snow can leave parts of the region barren while other parts have a foot or more of snow. Winds speeds are typically 10 to 20 miles per hour. Wind speeds have been measured above 100 mph (45 m/s), with wind gusts as high as 125 mph (56 m/s), though this is primarily a spring phenomenon. The wind direction is predominately out of the Southwest. Wind speeds at the 2.4-meter telescope location are frequently 2 times as high wind speeds at the optical interferometer site due to the differences in terrain to the West of the two sites. An optical allsky camera has been in operation on the Ridge from 2003 to 2012 with nightly sequences of images obtained on most nights when the winds were less than 15 m/s and the humidity below 90%. Analysis of this imagery shows that a majority of the nights would be useable for astronomical observations. We present an overview of statistics of the site and discuss how these statistics will be used for defining appropriate operational windows for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer.

The Osservatorio Polifunzionale del Chianti is a new astronomical site located in the neighbourhoods of San Donato in Poggio (Firenze), on top of one of the highest hills of the Chianti area, among the darkest places in Tuscany, and it is managed by the University of Florence. The name takes origin from the different observatories that are hosted in the building. Beside the Astronomical Observatory, Geo-seismic, Meteorological and Environmental Observatories fully operate in a fruitful synergic collaboration among themselves.

Presently, the main research activity at OPC concerns the observation and follow-up of transiting exoplanets while the team is involved in national and international collaborations, like TESS SG1 follow-up for the observation of exoplanet candidates and GAPS, which exploits several telescopes and facilities in Italy (Asiago, OAVdA) and Canary Islands (HARPS-North and GIANO instruments as well as their improved combined version) for exoplanetary characterization.

OPC researchers perform their activity in the framework of collaborations with Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino and Osservatorio Autonomo della Val d'Aosta. From July 2017, to date, commissioning observing runs have been done in order to test the telescope and mount capabilities, systematics and limits and to eventually improve the accuracy of the overall system. A software algorithm has been developed¹ in order to estimate the accuracy of any transit observation, so that parameters like the integration time and telescope focus can be chosen to obtain a higher signal to noise ratio, and also to understand the observational limits of the instruments. Currently, the system is able to work within±1 mmag of accuracy and differential photometry error (refer to the error bars in Figure 6) so that exoplanet transits with (see abstract for symbol _5 mmag) of relative depth can be observed fruitfully.

The OPC Research Team also aims at the observation of the optical/visible counterpart of gamma ray bursts afterglows, supernovae and GW ToO (Gravitational Waves events / Targets of Opportunity) follow-up along with transiting exoplanets follow-up. The reason is twofold. First of all, the scientific interest on these events of the researchers supporting OPC, and then the demand of the astronomical community for follow-up observations with small telescopes, around the 1-m class, since larger telescopes are often used for primary targets observations. To pursue the target of observing GRBs and the optical counterpart of GW events, it is planned to improve the main instrument accuracy and to develop a consolidated observation procedure, to be ready for the next LIGO-VIRGO O3 run scheduled for the Autumn, 2018.

To take full advantage of the upcoming era of LSST, time-domain astronomy, and proposals that span multiple semesters and may have hundreds of targets, it was decided to upgrade the software for the Southern African Large Telescope. At the heart of the upgrade were changes to the MySQL database. A new web-based API allows an automated submission of targets of opportunities. This API is also used by a React-based single page application for real time updates of time allocations. The software upgrade also includes extensible web pages for monitoring data quality.

About a decade ago, the W.M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) summit facilities did not possess a building automation system capable of remote monitoring or control. At that time, there were two different and obsolete automation systems serving Keck I and Keck II respectively. Not only were these systems unable to be accessed remotely, staff was unfamiliar with their operation. Without capability for remote access by on-call engineers, operations teams were consistently forced to travel to the summit during night time operations to address mechanical problems; contributing to greater loss of observing time. Moreover, overall facility operations could not be monitored for efficiency or trend logged to predict breakdowns. Implementation of a new building automation system began in 2009. The impact of adopting this new platform is increased facility efficiencies, better breakdown predictability, and new more efficient ways of scheduling planned maintenance. The challenges, successes and remaining work for the Observatory implementing a building automation system are presented.

The Arizona Robotic Telescope Network (ARTN) project is a long term effort to develop a system of telescopes to carry out a flexible program of PI observing, survey projects, and time domain astrophysics including monitoring, rapid response, and transient/target-of-opportunity followup. Steward Observatory operates and shares in several 1-3m class telescopes with quality sites and instrumentation, largely operated in classical modes. Science programs suited to these telescopes are limited by scheduling flexibility and people-power of available observers. Our goal is to adapt these facilities for multiple co-existing queued programs, interrupt capability, remote/robotic operation, and delivery of reduced data. In the long term, planning for the LSST era, we envision an automated system coordinating across multiple telescopes and sites, where alerts can trigger followup, classification, and triggering of further observations if required, such as followup imaging that can trigger spectroscopy. We are updating telescope control systems and software to implement this system in stages, beginning with the Kuiper 61” and Vatican Observatory 1.8-m telescopes. The Kuiper 61” and its Mont4K camera can now be controlled and queue-scheduled by the RTS2 observatory control software, and operated from a remote room at Steward. We discuss science and technical requirements for ARTN, and some of the challenges in adapting heterogenous legacy facilities, scheduling, data pipelines, and maintaining capabilities for a diverse user base.

A fast photometry methodology is described. We use a cooled Ixon Ultra emCCD in photon counter mode to acquire data. A dissipation system is added to stabilize the temperature down to -96 C. The sensibility of this system makes it ideal even for small telescopes.

For almost two decades, large volumes of technical data, in a variety of formats, have resulted from the normal operations at the observatory. Similarly, in the last few years, dealing with huge amounts of data has become a priority for several industries, and as consequence, terms like "Big Data" or "Data Lake" have started to be more and more commonly used. Under these circumstances, frameworks and tools have proliferated and later released as "Open Software"; the hardware, on the other hand, has also changed giving the power to deal with this volume of data in a reasonable timeframe, and at a reasonable price.

We hereafter present the first version of a modern data lab developed for the Maintenance Support and Engineering Department (MSE) at the Paranal Observatory, “The MSE DataLab”. This DataLab will allow us to take advantage of this new technological evolution and to be prepared for the current and further challenges to come. These challenges, of course, refer to improving the overall observatory dependability (Reliability, Availability and Maintainability) by supporting the operations in our current and forthcoming telescopes. First, in our Very Large Telescopes (VLT), the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) and the survey telescopes (VISTA and VST). Secondly, in the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory, with its 66 individual radiotelescopes and other central equipment, generates a massive set of monitoring data everyday, collecting information on the performance of a variety of critical and complex electrical, electronic, and mechanical components. By using this crucial data, engineering teams have developed and implemented both model and machine learning-based fault detection methodologies that have greatly enhanced early detection or prediction of hardware malfunctions. This paper presents the results of the development of a fault detection and diagnosis framework and the impact it has had on corrective and predictive maintenance schemes.

Scheduling problem of space mission is described in general. We propose a simplified model to solve it based on the World Space Observatory--Ultraviolet (WSO--UV) mission approach to scheduling.

We follow the history of the US National Gemini Office from its origin when the US National New Technology Telescope was reshaped into two 8m telescopes for the International Gemini Observatory. The development of the office in the decade of the 1990s continues to shape its function to the present. The following decade, 2000–2010, marked major milestones including the dedication of the telescopes, the reshaping of the Gemini instrumentation program, and dissatisfaction of the US community as expressed in the ALTAIR report. Nationally funded facilities are under financial pressure, as new projects must be funded from a nearly fixed budget. We will discuss how the US NGO should be used to advocate for both the US community and the Gemini Observatory. This role could be an essential one in protecting open access to 8m-class facilities.

For years following its 2006 debut, Twitter was rarely used as a medium for serious communication; however, today many scientific organizations are using the platform not only for public outreach, but for substantive communication scientist to scientist. Since the mission of the Chandra Data Archive is making data swiftly available in a variety of ways for astronomers and astrophysicists who want it, we have lately initiated the design of a Chandra Data Archive Twitter portal for the most current archive-related information { with a focus on highlighting data products which have been in the archive for many years, but have not attracted all the attention they deserve. This work is supported by NASA contract 8-03060.

During laser propagation we are required to prevent the accidental illumination of aircraft and satellites. The first requirement is fulfilled by constantly monitoring air traffic in the vicinity of the observatory and stopping propagation when an airplane gets close to the laser propagation direction, as detected by an automatic aircraft detection system.

Satellite avoidance is accomplished through coordination with the military-operated Laser Clearinghouse (LCH), which provides a daily list of allowable time windows for every potential target on the sky. Unlike aircraft avoidance, satellite avoidance is predictive and therefore can be integrated in the planning for telescope operations.

We describe and discuss the impact of both avoidance schemes on the operation efficiency of the observatory.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) will obtain millions of spectra each year in the optical to near-infrared, at low (R ≃ 3; 000) to high (R ≃ 40; 000) spectral resolution by observing <4,000 spectra per pointing via a highly multiplexed fiber-fed system. Key science programs for MSE include black hole reverberation mapping, stellar population analysis of faint galaxies at high redshift, and sub-km/s velocity accuracy for stellar astrophysics.

One key metric of the success of MSE will be its survey speed, i.e. how many spectra of good signal-to-noise ratio will MSE be able to obtain every night and every year. This is defined at the higher level by the observing efficiency of the observatory and should be at least 80%, as indicated in the Science Requirements.

In this paper we present the observing efficiency budget developed for MSE based on historical data at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and other Maunakea Observatories. We describe the typical sequence of events at night to help us compute the observing efficiency and how we envision to optimize it to meet the science requirements

Low frequency radio sites are susceptible to radio frequency interference (RFI) from a vast array of man-made interferers. For that reason, astronomers attempt to find sites far away from populated areas. Despite this, anomalous propagation on occasion leads to signals from far away population centres impinging on these otherwise radio quiet sites. Using an array of bespoke software and receivers, we are characterising the site of the Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO) in remote Western Australia (WA). This is the same site where the Australian Square Kilometre Pathfinder (ASKAP) is now in early science operations and also is the future site of the Australian contribution to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, SKA low. We describe the setup of the RFI detection system used to track all known emitters providing location information, including terrestrial mobile communications, aviation, marine, and space based transmitters, most of which are used to detect and analyse anomalous propagation events and cross correlate the data with meteorological model and observational data to validate a ducting prediction model.

This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 10704, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction and Conference Committee listing.