Data Flow

The complete planning cycle follows these steps:

1. Target Ingestion

Targets can arrive through four paths:

flowchart TD
    A["Alert\n(ALeRCE · Gaia · Lasair · TNS)"] --> B["CreateTargetFromAlertView"]
    B --> B1["Infers category\n(TRANSIENT, PERIODIC)"]
    B --> B2["Auto-creates SchedulingProfile"]

    C["Manual creation"] --> D["TOM Toolkit — Add Target"]
    D --> D1["SchedulingProfile\ncreated manually"]

    E["Upload CSV"] --> F["Massive SchedulingProfile creation"]
    H["Via API/REST"] --> F

2. Constraint Configuration

The astronomer configures the target's SchedulingProfile:

Field	Description
facility	Telescope to use
category	STANDARD / TRANSIENT / PERIODIC / NON-SIDEREAL
min_altitude, max_airmass	Observability constraints
min_moon_distance, max_moon_illumination	Lunar constraints
min_seeing, transparency_type	Sky quality constraints
ObservationFrames	Filters, exposures, dithering
priority	Urgency multiplier

3. Scheduler Execution

When Scheduler is executed, SchedulerCore runs the following pipeline:

flowchart TD
    subgraph GCW["generate_candidate_windows()"]
        subgraph LOOP["↻  For each active SchedulingProfile"]
            B["AstronomyEngine.get_observable_blocks()\nCompute observable time blocks for the night"]
            C["Filter intervals above the horizon"]
            D["Apply constraints\nairmass · moon · weather · night_type"]
            E["ScoringStrategy.calculate_score()\nScore each valid interval"]
            F(["CandidateWindow\nwith average score"])
            B --> C --> D --> E --> F
        end
    end

    subgraph ALLOC["GreedyAllocationStrategy.allocate(candidates)"]
        G["Sort candidates by score — descending"]
        H["Assign non-overlapping slots per facility"]
        G --> H
    end

    GCW --> ALLOC
    ALLOC --> K[("Save ScheduledWindow records to DB")]

4. Visualisation

Once scheduling is complete, TimelineView loads the generated ScheduledWindow records and serves them to the frontend through three JSON endpoints:

Endpoint	Description
GET /scheduler/api/events/	Scheduled windows for the FullCalendar view
GET /scheduler/api/gantt/	Observation distribution per facility across the night
GET /scheduler/api/nightly/	Tonight's targets with scores and visibility windows

5. Export / Execution

Once the schedule is ready, two output paths are available:

• CSV export — Downloads a file with the complete schedule (target, start, end, score, frames).
• ASCOM Controller — Executes the sequence robotically, slewing the telescope at each scheduled time.