User Guide

Welcome to the RIA-TOM user guide. RIA-TOM is an astronomical observation scheduling platform developed at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for professional observatories. It is designed to make the process of planning observations easy, optimal, and straightforward — replacing hours of manual work with an intelligent, constraint-aware scheduler.

No programming knowledge is required to use this guide.

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Dashboard

When you first log in, you land on the Home Page, which shows the scheduler dashboard at a glance.

Target counters

On the left side of the dashboard you will find three counters:

Counter	Description
Total targets	All targets stored in your database
Scheduled targets	Targets that have a scheduling profile configured
Active targets	Staged targets currently enabled for scheduling

Moon illumination

On the right side, you can check tonight's Moon illumination percentage. This is computed in real time for your observatory's location and is a quick reference before running the scheduler.

Observatory configuration

Below the counters is the Observatory Settings panel. Here you can set:

• Observatory name — used for display and logging purposes.
• Location (latitude, longitude) — used to fetch weather data and compute local sidereal time.

Once saved, the weather forecast panel below will update automatically and show the predicted cloud cover, seeing, and transparency for your site.

Setting your location

Make sure to configure your observatory's coordinates before running the scheduler for the first time. The weather forecast and twilight calculations depend on this.

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Workflow overview

The typical workflow in RIA-TOM follows five steps:

flowchart LR
    A["1. Add targets\n(catalog / manual / alerts)"]
    B["2. Configure telescopes\n(location + constraints)"]
    C["3. Set up scheduling profiles\n(constraints + frames)"]
    D["4. Plan your nights\n(observation windows)"]
    E["5. Run the scheduler\n& review the schedule"]

    A --> B --> C --> D --> E

Sections in this guide

Section	What you will learn
Managing Targets	How to add, import, and organise targets
Configuring Telescopes	How to register and set up your telescope(s)
Defining Constraints	Available observability constraints and observation frames
Observation Planning	Running the scheduler end-to-end
Viewing Schedules	Interpreting the Gantt chart, visibility curves, and exporting results