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RIA TOM Toolkit

RIA TOM (Red de Infraestructuras de Astronomía — Target and Observation Manager) is an astronomical observation planning tool developed at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for the Spanish Astronomy Infrastructure Network (RIA).

What is RIA TOM?

Astronomers typically use a variety of disconnected tools to plan their observations, even when using a TOM system to manage their targets. RIA TOM integrates all the necessary functionalities for the complete observation cycle into a single platform:

  • Target management: Built on TOM Toolkit, supports sidereal, non-sidereal, periodic, and transient objects.
  • Visibility calculations: Uses astropy and astroplan to compute altitude, airmass, lunar distance, and observability windows.
  • Automatic scheduling: The Scheduler module prioritizes and sorts candidate targets, generating an optimized nightly plan.
  • Weather integration: Queries real-time forecasts to reject windows with poor sky conditions.
  • Telescope control: Optional support for sending observations to robotic telescopes via ASCOM or OCS-compatible facilities.

General Architecture

The project consists of two main modules:

Module Description
ria-tom Django project that configures the TOM and main views
scheduler Reusable Django app containing the scheduling engine

Quick Start

cd ria-tom
docker compose up --build

See the Installation guide for full details.

Project Structure

root-dir/
├── ria-tom/            # Main Django project (TOM)
│   └── iac_tom/        # Settings, URLs, views, facilities, cadences
└── scheduler/          # Django app — scheduling engine
    └── scheduler/      # Models, views, strategies, utilities

Technology Stack

  • Web framework: Django 4.2 + TOM Toolkit 2.30
  • Astronomy: astropy 6.1, astroplan 0.10
  • Data: SQLite (development), PostgreSQL (recommended for production)
  • Frontend: Bootstrap, FullCalendar (interactive timeline)
  • Code quality: Ruff, djlint, pre-commit