Telescope Live Suggest New Observation Feature

Telescope Live has a feature where you can suggest new 1-Click Observation targets for future 1-Click Observation image data for every member to use.  I do a lot of work planning my observation targets for backyard imaging, and because of the poor quality skies that I have here, a lot of targets I’d like to get simply aren’t available to me.   This new feature literally opens up my choices several magnitudes wide.

In your Dashboard under the One-Click Observations selection on the left side of the screen, the 4th selection down is Suggest New Observation.  When you select this, you’ll see the target selections you’ve already entered for consideration and their status (Approved or Pending) or it will be blank if haven’t made a suggestion yet.  In the upper right is the + New Suggestion button.  Click that button to start the process.

The process is very similar to making an Advanced Request; the first window you enter is to identify the proposed target.  Simply put in the target designation and the target’s celestial coordinates should automatically pop in.  When you click on Next Step, the Telescope Selection window should appear.  Here, you’re shown the available telescopes you can use for this target.  This will require understanding which telescope / camera combination would provide good framing for the target involved.  This screen will also show you an estimate of how soon you might be able to see data which is based on an estimated 60 minute session with a 25% moon.  After you’ve selected the equipment, you’re shown how the image series will be set up.  You can make changes here for the filters you’d like to use, the amount of time for the exposures, etc.

Once you have that settled and go to the next task, a window will come up that basically asks, “Why is this target compelling enough that we should image it?”.  As you normally would when you’re planning targets to observe and / or image from the backyard, you should know why you’d like to spend time on it.  Keep in mind that this is your chance to suggest targets that may not be well known nor have you seen them on Telescope Live before - the number of choices of targets is pretty wide open.  You’ll need to do some homework before you get to this point executing whatever process you use to find nice targets to observe and image, but you should be very gleeful at the opportunity you have.

When you’ve submitted the suggestion, it will show up in your suggestion group as “Pending”.  If it’s approved, you’ll receive an email saying so and it will be queued up to be completed.  You’ll also receive notifications when observations of your suggested target are completed and the data is ready to be grabbed.  You’ll be able to find the target data if you do a search of All Observations.

My first target suggestion was M 100.  I’ve attached my processed image of the data taken.  You should be able to get the data here with this link:  https://app.telescope.live/click-grab/all?target=M100.   I was very lucky and my suggested target got 8+ hours of data to work with.   If there is a target you'd like to see 1-Click data for, use this feature.  For this process to be effective, make sure your target will be visible in the region the imaging telescope is in - otherwise, your proposed target may have a long wait before getting a chance to be observed.