Supporting users in their observation preparation - the ESO ObsPrep tool

Abstract

Ground based observatories are experiencing significant technological advances and telescopes are getting equipped with highly complex instruments to enable cutting-edge astronomical research. The increasing complexity of such instruments displays a challenge to their users when they want to plan and prepare specific observation programmes, that often request to define large amount of detailed instrument-specific information. Therefore, at ESO we developed an Observation Preparation tool (in short ObsPrep tool), which provides a layer of abstraction over the instrument-specific technical details and tries to harmonize the users experience when being faced with the preparation of observation blocks for different complex instruments. The ObsPrep tool allows interactive planning of the observations by visualization of various actions and observing strategies. In a joint approach by software engineers and astronomers, ObsPrep was started as a stand-alone java desktop application and over the years has evolved into an angular based web-application. It is now fully integrated in ESOs general use phase2 user interface (p2) that allows ESO users to create, modify, or delete observation blocks. Here we present the core functionalities of ObsPrep, as well as its special features and how the user interface integrates into ESOs generic phase2 observation preparation tool. We also outline the upcoming plans to incorporate the observation preparation for the instruments of the next generation of ESOs large telescopes, the ELT, into ObsPrep.