Science & progression
Observation Activities
Observatory Command includes optional hands-on scientific tasks in addition to passive management. They reward careful interaction without making the entire research economy depend on minigames.
Routine nightly activities
At useful night hours, telescope facilities can offer up to two optional quality-control activities. The available activity depends on the facility and observing context.
Tune focus and guide corrections until calibration stars are compact and round.
Match catalog stars to a live finder field and complete a plate solution.
Choose high-value sky tiles and arrange an efficient observing sequence before dawn.
Tune an SDR-style receiver, shortlist suspicious peaks, and identify a credible drifting signal.
Inspect a radio waterfall and mask contaminated bands without deleting astronomical signal.
Nightly quality recovery
Missing nightly activities can reduce the observatory’s data-quality state. After a miss, successful nights below the pre-miss baseline receive an accelerated recovery gain. Once the earlier baseline is restored, normal successful-night gains resume. The Data Archive reports when recovery is underway.
Scientific data-review queue
Focused research programs periodically create interactive synthetic datasets. The queue holds four packets and each unreviewed packet expires after roughly 45 game days. New packets are lost if all four queue slots are occupied.
Classify solar features and identify localized flare/eruptive candidates.
Compare a mapped lunar reference image to a follow-up frame and classify suspicious changes.
Inspect a three-exposure tracklet and distinguish NEOs, comets, main-belt objects, artifacts, and satellites.
Read synthetic light curves and distinguish transit candidates from binaries, variables, artifacts, and noise.