SPOT

Site Planning and Observation Tool (SPOT)

About

SPOT (Site Planning and Observation Tool) is a graphical tool for planning and conducting astronomical observations at a site. Here are few of the things it can do:

• You can select a site and date/time when you plan to observe (it's also easy to add your own custom site).
• It can show you an astronomical almanac of information about a particular date (sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, twilights, etc).
• It can load lists of targets and plot them on a polar plot for their position in the sky at the current time or any given time.
• It can show you the various targets' visibility as a plot of altitude vs. time.
• It can overlay fisheye-type sky camera images on the polar plot so that you can monitor for cloud coverage.
• With the right customization it can show you where your telescope target is, the current telescope position and the slew that it will take to get there on the polar plot.
• It can look up catalog images from various sources for a given target and show instrument detector overlays on top, with adjustable position angle.

Installation

See the quick installation instructions.

To build a standalone desktop application (a macOS .app or a Windows .exe) that end users can run without installing Python, see the instructions in mkapp/README.rst.

Documentation

See the SPOT documentation at RTD.