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Projects and observations

Two things in Skynet sound similar but do different jobs:

  • Observation — a single request for data: a target, what to collect, and when. This is the unit the telescopes actually run.
  • Project — a collection of related observations grouped under one scientific intent, with a single page that tracks progress and results across the whole effort.

Knowing the difference makes the rest of the site easier to navigate.

Observations

An observation is one request for telescope data. You build it in the observation editor: pick the target, describe the data you want, set the scheduling and instrument rules, then create it. Once created, an observation is visible to the scheduler, generates tasks, and consumes credit against your funding account and grant as those tasks run — subject to whatever quotas the account and grant carry (see Observing accounts → Credit accounting).

A one-off observation can live entirely on its own — you don't have to put it in a project.

Projects

A project is a folder for related observations. It carries a name, a description, an owner (the user or organization funding the work), and the set of observations linked to it. Use a project whenever the work is more than a single request — a campaign, a class assignment, a coordinated follow-up — so everything stays organized under one page that shows progress and results across the whole effort.

There are two ways to make a project:

  1. Build your own. Create an empty project, then add observations to it as you go. Best when the science is specific to you and there's no existing recipe that fits.
  2. Start from the project catalog. Pick a ready-made project from Skynet's catalog and create your own copy of it. Each catalog project comes with guides and information for completing it — what it does, what telescope time it needs, what to expect, and the observations already configured for you. Best when the work is a standard exercise or a well-trodden science workflow. See the Project catalog.

Examples of projects

A sampling of the ready-made projects in the catalog, to give a sense of the range — from first-night exercises to research-grade measurements:

  • A month of moonlight — image the Moon across a full lunar cycle to build a phases gallery.
  • Planetary portrait — capture the planets currently up.
  • Messier showpiece sampler — image a curated set of Messier objects (galaxies, nebulae, and clusters).
  • The Galilean dance — follow Jupiter's four bright moons from night to night and watch them swap places.
  • Find Pluto — catch Pluto's motion against the background stars across several nights.
  • Galaxies in collision — image interacting galaxy pairs caught mid-merger.
  • Age of an open cluster — two-color photometry of a star cluster, build its Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, and read the age off the main-sequence turnoff.
  • The Cepheid yardstick — measure a Cepheid's light curve and turn its period into a distance with Leavitt's law.
  • Measure the height of a lunar mountain — use shadow lengths near the terminator to estimate a mountain's height.

Your own projects can be anything in that spirit: variable-star monitoring across many epochs, a multi-band imaging campaign on one field, a survey area broken into tiles, and so on.

Results and deliverables

A project isn't only a place to launch observations — it's also where you gather the results. Every project has a results area where you can attach the things that come out of the work:

  • Images — your processed pictures, finder charts, or final stacks, shown as a gallery on the project page.
  • Files — data products like a photometry table, a light-curve CSV, or a write-up to download.
  • Measurements — numeric answers the project asks for (a fitted cluster age, a rotation period, a distance), recorded with their units.
  • Notes — free-text observations, analysis, and caveats.

Catalog projects go a step further: they spell out exactly which deliverables to capture. Age of an open cluster, for instance, asks you to upload your matched photometry, your color–magnitude diagram, and your fitted age — so the project page doubles as a checklist that walks you from raw frames to a finished result. Projects you build yourself start with an empty results area you can fill in however you like.

When to make a project

Make a project when any of these are true:

  • You'll make more than one observation that's scientifically related.
  • You want a single page that shows progress and results across the whole effort.
  • You want to share access at the project level rather than per observation.
  • You're starting from the project catalog — that always creates a project.

If you're just running a single observation, skip the project and work directly in the editor.