VariSky Planner - a night observations planner dedicated to variable sources

[Geoffrey]

Hello everyone.

I’m a french space science enthusiast learning python for months (years?) with generative AI. It happens that we have a project at my local club to use a 8” f4 refractor in remote exclusively for photometry (long term AGN survey, SN, exoplanets, some variable stars…) with an educational purpose in mind. So after a few little tools made with Python just for fun, I started a “big thing” : making a software that provide me with the best targets for the night, chosen in a custom made database.

The software calculate the astronomical night and moon phase and illumination, and run a scoring algorithm to sort all the potential targets regarding a set of constraints : magnitude, elongation from the moon, heigh in the sky, etc. The scoring algorithm take count of the mag of the target correlating it with the distance of the moon depending of its illumination. i.e., it provides more luminous targets if the moon is too bright, and exclude the faintests ones and the closests one.

The software then generate a list of potential targets for that night and you can choose wich one you want to insert in your observational planning, and the hours of observation.With the help of Fabian I managed to use the Astro-COLIBRI API to be able to incorporate the latests trensients alerts in the observation planning.

A right click on a target plot the visibility for the night and an option is set to plot the visibility of all the planning. This window is real-time updated when modification is done in the planning.

Here is where I am now with this software I called VariSky Planner. Next steps will be the incorporation of exoplanets transits, configuration of observation blocs (number of frames and exposure time for each filters, using an exptime calculator I’m currently working on, and a filter mag transformator to get Johnson-Cousins mag from SDSS and vice-versa) and finally the exportation of sequence to send it directly to EKOS (and maybe NINA).

If someone is interested to take a look at the code, just let me know. I will be very happy to have advices !

The core of the planner is the database : you can make one containing all your prefered variable sources or the ones you want to follow and run planner this way. For now, the db I use is filled with 600ish sources of all types, from AGN to RR Lyrae, as the first goal of this software is for educationnal purposes with my clubmates.

Thanks for reading.

Best regards.
G.

[Geoffrey]

here is the latests Astro-COLIBRI trensients retrieved with the API.

here are the visibility plot windows, for all the planning and for a signle target.

[marc.serrau2]

Welcome to the site. This is interesting. A few ideas/comments:

• Do you handle color filters in the sequencing?
• Do you take into account the limiting hour angle for German mounts?
• The last known magnitude of an AT can be useful to determine whether the object is still observable and, if so, how long exposure time will be needed to achieve a good signal-to-noise ratio, depending on the telescope, camera, filter used, and other parameters.
• For RR Lyrae type stars, current work (such as that by the GEOS group, for example) focuses on determining maximums and establishing o-c values compared to predicted maxima. It would be interesting to incorporate the ephemerides of each variable star and, more difficult, the latest known o-c values. See GEOS RR Lyr database. Is this the case?

How will the tool be accessible? Anyway, thank you for the presentation.

[Geoffrey]

Hello Marc. Thanks for your remarks and ideas.

• Yes, my goal is to configurate each sequence (bloc) with color filters and an exposure time for each filter.
• I currently don’t take account of hour angle limitation. I have to take a look closer, but I think this is handled directly in EKOS.
• The last know mag is of course an important value to chose an exposure time. For now I don’t read it with my API request, but I put a button to open Astro-COLIBRI app on the API window. I thinks it’s important to take a look of all the information shown by the app before planning and observation. But this will certainly be updated in a further version.
• Thanks for the information about GEOS RR Lyr db. I didn’t know it. If I find a way to retrieve ephemeris for variable stars (RR Lyr, Eb, etc) I will for sure put it in the software, but for now I didn’t find something complete (and simple!) enough to be useful for me.

I have no particular plan to make it widely available. For now, a lot of features are hard-coded in my scripts (account id key of Astro-COLIBRI, all the features of the optical train in the exptime calculator…) and a whole new GUI is needed to make it available widely. But as I said, I will provide all the scripts to everyone who want it.

Thanks for your feedback.

Clear skyes