Introduction

The ambition of Arcsecond is to offer professional-quality software for astronomers and observatories to manage data, execute night operations and perform the best astronomical observations possible. It is built on top of years of experience of professional software development following a 10-years period of astronomical research, and especially 4 years spent in Chile, working for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the La Silla Observatory.

Arcsecond was initiated to bring to the web a well-known macOS app, called iObserve. It is now expanding to offer powerful portals to small and medium-size observatories. Moreover, Arcsecond is being transformed to work not only in the cloud, but also in self-hosted environments.

As of today (April 2023), Arcsecond is only available in the cloud, but you can register for the beta in https://www.arcsecond.io/self-hosting (expected around end 2023).

OMA

OMA stands for "Observatorio Mancomunado de Astrofísica". It is a consortium of Chilean Universities, coordinated by the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS) that operates a telescope located in El Sauce Observatory, in the Atacama desert.

OMA is the first Observatory Portal of Arcsecond, and is used throughout this documentation to illustrate it with images taken in real conditions.