Observatory Headquarters
Every Arcsecond.local installation is multi-user by design. You do not opt into a separate "organisation" or "portal" product — the moment you run Arcsecond.local, you are running a shared space for your whole observatory, science group, university, planetarium or astronomy club. Observatory Headquarters is the app where that shared life is managed.
"All astronomical observatories in the world have in common the needs to prepare and plan observations, organise and execute night operations, then store, package and distribute data."
— Cédric Foellmi, Ph.D. (former ESO Fellow in La Silla, and Arcsecond Founder)
The other three apps — Night Studio, the Control Room and Data Grand Central — are the same for every member of your install. Observatory Headquarters adds the organisation-wide layer on top of them.
What it gives you
- A single home for the whole life of your observatory — the history of all observations, observers, targets and observing nights, and a modern data archive built on the same APIs that power the rest of the platform, even for data located elsewhere (see External Storages).
- An unlimited number of members, with a clear, easy-to-manage 5-level permission scheme to control who can do what and who can access what.
- Sharing, from a private dataset between two members up to a customizable public page exposing selected data to the world.
- An Observatory Schedule to manage what happens across your telescopes and observers over time — switchable between a calendar view, a telescopes timeline or an observers timeline, including recurring events.
Members and roles
Membership and access are governed by five purely-hierarchical roles, from Anonymous up to Superadmin. The full capability matrix is on the Permissions & Roles page.