TOM Toolkit
The TOM Toolkit is a web framework for building TOMs: Target and Observation Managers. TOMs are meant to facilitate collaborative astronomical observing projects. A typical TOM allows its users to curate target lists, request observations of those targets at various observatories as well as manage and organize their data. Read more about TOMs.
Getting started with the TOM Toolkit
The getting started guide will guide you through the process of setting up a TOM for the first time.
Reporting issues/feature requests
Please use the issue tracker to report any issues or support questions.
Development Team
The lead developers of the TOM Toolkit are William Lindstrom and Joey Chatelain, professional software developers with the Las Cumbres Observatory software team, together with Jon Nation, Curtis McCully, Matt Daily and Mark Bowman. Rachel Street is the project's Principle Investigator. The TOM Toolkit is grateful for the advice and collaboration with Andy Howell, Edward Gomez, Craig Pellegrino, Jamie Burke and the rest of the LCO Science team. The original Toolkit was developed by Austin Riba, David Collom and William Lindstrom.
Our team very much welcome input from the community, and we are grateful to the following people for their many contributions:
- Dan Avner, NOIRLab
- Doug Arnold, Liverpool Telescope
- Etienne Bachelet, IPAC/Caltech
- Ezequiel Contreras Martinez, UCSB
- Griffin Hosseinzadeh, University of Arizona
- Bryan Miller, Gemini Observatory
- Brendan Mills, UCSB
- Julien Peloton, Fink
Acknowledgements
We hope you find our software useful for your research. If so, we would be grateful if you can include a brief acknowledgement in your papers and presentations, for example "This research made use of The TOM Toolkit". We would also very much appreciate you including a citation to our paper describing the Toolkit Street, R.A. et al., 2018, SPIE, 10707, 11 (to export the BibTeX please click here).
Contributing to the project
If you'd like to contribute to the TOM Toolkit, first of all, thanks! Secondly, we have a contribution guide that you might find helpful. We are particularly interested in the contribution of observation and alert modules.
Community Code of Conduct
We encourage developers to maintian a lively and civil discourse either on github or in our slack workspace. Please review our code of conduct for information about what is considered unacceptable behavior and how to report it.
Developer information
For development information targeted at the maintainers of the project, please see README-dev.md.
Plugins
Different TOM systems have different science goals and sometimes need different functions. Rather than require users to support all dependencies from all possible functions, we support a range of optional plugin modules for the Toolkit. Have a look at our list of plugins see which would benefit your science goals.
Antares
The tom-antares plugin adds support for querying the Antares broker for targets of interest.
tom_nonsidereal_airmass
The tom_nonsidereal_airmass plugin provides a templatetag that supports plotting for non-sidereal objects. The plugin is fully supported by the TOM Toolkit team; however, non-sidereal visibility calculations require the PyEphem library, which is minimally supported while its successor is in development. The library used for the TOM Toolkit sidereal visibility, astroplan, does not yet support non-sidereal visibility calculations.
tom-lt
This module provides the ability to submit observations to the Liverpool Telescope Phase 2 system. It is in a very alpha state, with little error handling and minimal instrument options, but can successfully submit well-formed observation requests.
tom_registration
The tom_registration plugin introduces support for two TOM registration flows--an open registration, and a registration that requires administrator approval. Our philosophy is to keep the TOM as lightweight and adaptable as possible.
About the TOM Toolkit
The TOM Toolkit is managed by Las Cumbres Observatory, with generous financial support from the National Science Foundation grant 2209852. We are also grateful for support from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Zegar Family Foundation at the start of the project.
2 maintainers
Release files for tomtoolkit 3.1.0
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| tomtoolkit-3.1.0.tar.gz | 14.7 MB | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tomtoolkit-3.1.0-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 16.3 MB
Release files / tomtoolkit-3.1.0.tar.gz
| Download URL | tomtoolkit-3.1.0.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 14.7 MB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
022f15c27fe617f22133c586a10dedcd9731dd0eb867a8021e362978803d0db9
|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
3d44e1731c96c74510c3984059045b027469291af24e66ebe663fcff353efd85
|
| Upload date | |
|
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7
|
Provenance
Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.
PyPI Publish Attestation
PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.
Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Sep 24, 2026.
Transparency logRelease files / tomtoolkit-3.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | tomtoolkit-3.1.0-py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 1.6 MB |
| Tags | Python 3 |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
4d6deac3d7e3aa2a50a99cb0154e19c72cb3f682c29e8ec6ed2b0aca617acf42
|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
6b042ef3c813d64ee725d169983fb89ab8c2301bbb3af57f549312c0e861ff36
|
| Upload date | |
|
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7
|
Provenance
Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.
PyPI Publish Attestation
PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.
Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Sep 24, 2026.
Transparency log
