Observatories Forum

Sept 23-25, 2025 ⟡ Santa Barbara, CA

The Observatories Forum is a workshop series designed to bring together developers and engineers from different facilities spanning a range of wavelengths, with developers from the science community. The goal is to share experience, tools, challenges and plans, particularly those associated with enabling time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics.

Thank you to everyone who made this workshop so productive, both in-person and online! The presentations and session recording are linked from the agenda tab.

Topics covered included:

• Observatory software and its challenges
  • Including proposal/observation request systems, scheduling, observatory & instrument operations, observatory status, data pipelines and archiving
• Astronomer-side software tools and challenges
  • Including TOM/marshal systems, community messaging & coordination services, visibility tools, signal-to-noise/exposure time calculators etc
• Recent and planned development
  • Towards generalized APIs for proposal, observation requests across wavelengths