Classical Observing Support

[dmcollom]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The TOM Toolkit's observing interface is currently built primarily to interact with observatories via API. However, many telescopes do not have APIs, and are not usable in the fashion implemented in the TOM Toolkit.

Describe the solution you'd like The two main components involved seem to be the following:

• Tools for advance planning of observations for one or more nights of classical observing
• Support for adding records and data from classically-taken observations

[jfrostburke]

Re: tools for advance planning of classical observation nights

This also came up at Hot-wired from a participant who primarily observes classically. They were using iObserve, a service that lets you plot the airmass of several objects at once at a given observing site to plan which targets you want to observe in what order. They then export the target list in the correct observing order and save the airmass plot.

This would definitely be a useful add-on -- in the supernova group we sometimes have observing nights on classical facilities like Keck, and need to plan out observing nights manually. The Toolkit already has a lot of what we need to make this (facilities, targets, airmass generation), but it would definitely take some effort and thought to put it together into a user-friendly page.