Too easy to schedule observations

[pierros]

Hello all, I’ve been following this thread and would like to address some issues

@K3RLD

As Bob has illustrated with his screen grab, there is NO “good reason” for an observer scheduling 300+ observations PER DAY, many (most?) of which are NOAA satellites on the other side of the planet. This is flat out abuse. Additionally, there is no good way for me to “mark this slot” if the station use is “first come, first serve”. I am a slave to the clock, like everybody else, correct?

I want to make something crystal clear:

The scheduling goal for SatNOGS is 100% utilization of a station’s time.
We simply cannot have enough observations. (and no @K3RLD most are not NOAA, but even if it where we should be fine). The end goal for 100% coverage of any satellite we track requires we go down this road of 100% utilization of stations. This should not be considered an abuse. If anything those “schedulers” should be praised for keeping the network active and observations coming, so we can also debug, check stations and of course track as many satellites as frequently as possible. And as you can see here they are becoming more and more which is great! So yes it should be “extremely easy” to schedule observations by people that have access (active station owners), and we should work on automating the scheduling as much as possible. Check this thread for automation.

We have though to recognize the following situations:

• Some stations will not be able to cope with 100% utilization (due to bandwidth and/or processing constraints). Thus, we should consider the targeted utilization being an editable (by the station owner) attribute of the station and the auto-scheduler should respect that.
• Owners should be able to reserve time on their ground station (check this thread for details)
• Owners should be able to easily override existing observations. They already can delete anything on their stations, but it should be indeed easier for them to just override existing obs.

@bob

This is not a contest: points do not count.

This is not a contest, but every single observation counts. Blame the UI/UX (we are working on them!) and not the volunteers that keep the network active and are contributing tirelessly everyday (don’t forget the vetting!)

@all: assume best intentions in all cases and communicate when you have an issue or something seems off! A simple comment in your ground station description can go a long way!