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Observation detail page

Once you create an observation, the detail page is where you watch it run, see what tasks it spawned, and get to the data when it comes back. It's organized as a header plus several tabs — overview, tasks, results, files. This page covers the overview; the tabs each have their own pages.

The page lives at app/components/entity/ObservationDetailPage.tsx in the React port. Routes are /u/:slug/observations/:id/* (user-owned) and /orgs/:slug/observations/:id/* (org-owned).

The three bands of the overview tab

The overview is laid out top-to-bottom in three bands:

The top band carries:

  • Name and status (active / completed / canceled / paused).
  • Owner and creator (the entity funding it vs. the user who authored it — often the same, often not).
  • Action buttons — Edit (returns to the editor; see Step 5 — Review & create for what stays editable after you create it), cancel, share, open in Afterglow / Astromancer where applicable.

Live band

Auto-refreshing every ~20 seconds, this band shows:

  • Activity feed — chronological events for the observation: scheduled, started, completed, failed, comments, manual interventions.
  • Recent images — thumbnails from completed exposures, freshest first. When the observation produces non-image output (radio data), this surfaces the data-tool result previews instead.

This is what's usually on screen during an active observation — it's the cheap way to confirm "yes, my observation actually ran."

Configuration band

A read-only summary of what's in the database for this observation — target, request list, account / grant set, scheduling parameters, instrument access mode. Mirrors what's in the editor but you can't edit from here. To change anything material, head back to the editor, or cancel the observation if it has already generated tasks.

The tabs

Beyond the overview, the detail page exposes three tabs:

  • Tasks — the per-task execution view. Each task is one atomic unit the scheduler created from this observation.
  • Results — task-level outputs with thumbnail strips.
  • Files — flat browser of every asset attached to the observation, filterable by role (science, calibration, …).

Results

The Results panel deserves a section here because it's adjacent to Tasks and Files but does a different job.

Per task, the scheduler seeds a pending result record; as the processing pipeline progresses, that record fills in with output assets (a final image, a calibrated spectrum, a master calibration frame). Each card on the results panel shows:

  • Task type (optical imaging / radio mapping / …).
  • Current status (pending / running / completed / failed).
  • A thumbnail strip of the assets associated with the result.

Clicking a thumbnail opens a lightbox preview. For deeper file operations (raw vs. processed, role filtering, download), use the Files tab.

The component is at app/components/entity/ObservationResultsPanel.tsx.

Live data and refresh cadence

The detail page polls the observation and its task list every ~20 seconds. WebSocket subscriptions to the relevant streams will replace the polling at some point (and observatory dashboards already use the WS protocol); for now polling is the model the page is built on.

What's not on the detail page

A few things you might expect that live elsewhere:

  • Grant / account details — these live on the observing-accounts view, not on the observation. The observation references the grants that fund it, but quota and credit-usage history live on the grants and accounts, not on the observation.
  • Telescope-side context — what else was running on the assigned telescope, what the weather was doing — lives on the telescope's own page.
  • Project rollups — if the observation is part of a project, the project page is where you see cross-observation summaries.

Reference