ViSiON: Visibility Service for Observing Nights

TL;DR

ViSiON is a VO-compliant web service that simplifies planning astronomical observations by providing detailed visibility conditions, sky charts, and ephemerides for various targets, integrating multiple VO tools.

Contribution

It introduces a new web service that combines VO standards and existing tools to automate and enhance observation planning for solar system objects.

Findings

Provides customizable observing condition tables

Generates sky charts and ephemerides automatically

Outputs in multiple formats including PDF and VOTable

Abstract

Preparation of detailed night schedule prior to an observing run can be tedious, especially for solar system objects which coordinates are epoch-dependent. We aim at providing the community with a Web service compliant with Virtual Observatory (VO) standards, to create tables of observing conditions, together with airmass and sky charts, for an arbitrary list of targets. We take advantage of available VO services such as the SIMBAD astronomical database, the Aladin sky atlas, and the Miriade ephemerides generator to build a new service dedicated to the planning of observations. The requests for ephemerides charts and tables are handled by a VO-compliant Web service. For each date, and each target, coordinates in local and equatorial frames are computed, and used to select targets accordingly to user's criteria for visibility. This new service, dubbed ViSiON for Visibility Service for Observing Night, is a new method of Miriade Web service hosted at IMCCE. It allows anyone to create graphics of observing conditions and tables summarizing them, provided as PDF, VOTable, and xHTML documents.