The TOM Toolkit is a web framework for building TOMs: Target and Observation Managers. TOMs are meant to facilitate collaborative astronomical observing projects. A typical TOM allows its users to curate target lists, request observations of those targets at various observatories as well as manage and organize their data. Read more about TOMs.
The getting started guide will guide you through the process of setting up a TOM for the first time.
Please use the issue tracker to report any issues or support questions.
The lead developers of the TOM Toolkit are William Lindstrom and Joey Chatelain, professional software developers with the Las Cumbres Observatory software team, together with Jon Nation, Curtis McCully, Matt Daily and Mark Bowman. Rachel Street is the project's Principle Investigator. The TOM Toolkit is grateful for the advice and collaboration with Andy Howell, Edward Gomez, Craig Pellegrino, Jamie Burke and the rest of the LCO Science team. The original Toolkit was developed by Austin Riba, David Collom and William Lindstrom.
Our team very much welcome input from the community, and we are grateful to the following people for their many contributions:
- Dan Avner, NOIRLab
- Doug Arnold, Liverpool Telescope
- Etienne Bachelet, IPAC/Caltech
- Ezequiel Contreras Martinez, UCSB
- Griffin Hosseinzadeh, University of Arizona
- Bryan Miller, Gemini Observatory
- Brendan Mills, UCSB
- Julien Peloton, Fink
We hope you find our software useful for your research. If so, we would be grateful if you can include a brief acknowledgement in your papers and presentations, for example "This research made use of The TOM Toolkit". We would also very much appreciate you including a citation to our paper describing the Toolkit Street, R.A. et al., 2018, SPIE, 10707, 11 (to export the BibTeX please click here).
If you'd like to contribute to the TOM Toolkit, first of all, thanks! Secondly, we have a contribution guide that you might find helpful. We are particularly interested in the contribution of observation and alert modules.
We encourage developers to maintian a lively and civil discourse either on github or in our slack workspace. Please review our code of conduct for information about what is considered unacceptable behavior and how to report it.
For development information targeted at the maintainers of the project, please see README-dev.md.
The tom_alerts_dash plugin adds responsive ReactJS views to the
tom_alerts module for supported brokers.
The tom-antares plugin adds support for querying the Antares broker for targets of interest.
The tom_nonsidereal_airmass plugin provides a templatetag that supports plotting for non-sidereal objects. The plugin is fully supported by the TOM Toolkit team; however, non-sidereal visibility calculations require the PyEphem library, which is minimally supported while its successor is in development. The library used for the TOM Toolkit sidereal visibility, astroplan, does not yet support non-sidereal visibility calculations.
This module provides the ability to submit observations to the Liverpool Telescope Phase 2 system. It is in a very alpha state, with little error handling and minimal instrument options, but can successfully submit well-formed observation requests.
The tom_registration plugin introduces support for two TOM registration flows--an open registration, and a registration that requires administrator approval.
The TOM Toolkit is managed by Las Cumbres Observatory, with generous financial support from the National Science Foundation grant 2209852. We are also grateful for support from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Zegar Family Foundation at the start of the project.