Permissions & Roles

Everyone who signs in to Arcsecond.local holds one of three roles: Visitor, Member or Admin. Each role holds everything the role before it holds. The installation's owners are admins, with the few differences told below.

Members run the observatory from day to day. They see all of it and work with all of it: the observing setups and their equipment, the targets, the night plans and night logs, the data. They define setups and equipment, they take control of a setup to observe with it, and they assign setups to visitors. Visitors observe on the setups assigned to them: a member hands a visitor a setup for a range of observing nights, and during those nights the visitor takes control of it, drives its equipment and runs their own observing sequences on it. They must hold the setup's control to send it commands or to start a sequence on it, so only one visitor drives a setup at a time. They prepare their sequences whenever they like, and may pause or stop them at any time. At any time they read those setups, their telescopes and their equipment, and they always see the site itself: its weather, its safety status, its all-sky cameras. They keep their own target lists, and add targets: a target the observatory already has is found, never copied, so the observatory keeps one list of targets whoever added them. They see the targets of their lists and those they observed. The observatory keeps one night log per night and telescope, whoever observed, and each observation in it names its observer: a visitor sees the night logs of their setups' nights without the journal, which stays the members', their own observations in them, and the calibrations of those nights. In Data Grand Central, the frames a visitor takes are filed under their name, in a folder of their own for each setup and night; they see and download those, the calibrations of their setups' nights, and the public datasets, but edit or delete none of them, since the frames are the observatory's archive.

Admins make the critical changes: the observing sites and telescopes, the observatory's settings, the safety conditions and procedures, the transient-alert policies, the data storages, and the members and their roles. Engineers are usually admins. An admin never grants a role above their own. Owners, the account that set the installation up and those an owner made owners, are admins in everything else, with three differences: only an owner activates the installation's license, only an owner makes someone an owner, and an admin never changes or removes an owner. An installation always keeps at least one owner.

The complete list of what each role may do is generated from the server itself, so that it never drifts from what the server does: Roles and permissions. The copy of this documentation that ships inside an installation also lists the rights of the Control Room, of safety and of the installation, and explains visitors and their data in more detail.