Iowa Robotic Telescope Facilities

This form submits requests to the Rigel robotic telescope located in southern Arizona. On a 30 second exposure, the seeing limit on a clear filter is approximately 18^th magnitude.
You must have an observer code to use this facility.
Please do not use apostrophes or quotes in any input fields.
If you're not sure what the name of the object you want is, check out the catalogs. The form requires that the source name appear exactly as it does in our catalogs.
If you submit this form more than once per day, only the last submission will be accepted.

To submit an observing request, begin by entering your observer code, a project title and the observer name(s) in the fields provided. Then fill in one row per source object in the table below. The first three fields in each row are required and the remaining fields are optional. A row with a blank Object Name field is ignored entirely. Note that by using the Filters and Repeat features, one row can accommodate multiple filters and repetitive observations of one source object.

Step 1: Check observing conditions

Look at the line labeled darkness first and identify the current evening's observing window. Next, look at the three lines above labeled cloud cover, tran (sky transparency), and seeing (atmospheric seeing, i.e., the point-spread function of the atmosphere). In general, the darker colors correspond to more favorable observing conditions. Click on the graph for more information.