Introduction

About

Spot is a graphical tool created to assist with planning and conducting astronomical observations. It can display the telescope targets and telescope position on a polar sky plot, and plot the visibilty of targets. SPOT can also be setup to look up catalog images and overlay instrument fields of view.

Spot is written and maintained by software engineers at the Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and other maintainers. The code is released as open-source under a BSD license and maintained at https://github.com/naojsoft/spot.

Features

Here are few of the things SPOT can do:

• You can select a site and date/time when you plan to observe (it’s also easy to add your own custom site).

• It can show you an astronomical almanac of information about a particular date (sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, twilights, etc).

• It can load lists of targets and plot them on a polar plot for their position in the sky at the current time or any given time.

• It can show you the various targets’ visibility as a plot of altitude vs. time.

• It can overlay fisheye-type sky camera images on the polar plot so that you can monitor for cloud coverage.

• With the right customization it can show you where your telescope target is, the current telescope position and the slew that it will take to get there on the polar plot.

• It can look up catalog images from various sources for a given target and show instrument detector overlays on top, with adjustable position angle.