Welcome to SPINO’s Documentation!¶
SPINO (Software for exoPlanet vIsibility and Nightly Observations) is a self-contained Tkinter desktop application for planning exoplanet transit / secondary-eclipse phase-coverage observations. It wraps a scientific scheduling pipeline (catalog loading, desert filtering, per-planet visibility, TSM/ESM ranking, and telluric-overlap plots) behind an editable graphical interface, so every parameter that used to live in a Python config file is now a form field.
The widget/panel/theming layer is reused from
GUIBRUSHR, an earlier
toolkit by the same author; the
scheduling pipeline is bundled in src/spino/pipeline/. The whole thing is
standalone: all Python modules and data files it needs are vendored into the
package, so it runs offline out of the box.
Note
SPINO is a first-look, organizational aid, not an authoritative source. It turns a large catalog into a coherent, homogeneous shortlist so you can assemble a proposal quickly, but every value it reports (ephemerides, visibility windows, event durations, metrics) must be verified independently and carefully for each target before use.
Key Features¶
Every config parameter is editable in the GUI: catalog source, desert / extra filters, observatory (telescope + instrument + site), proposal window, observing & event-coverage constraints, hand-entered custom planets, the telluric-overlap plot grid, and all output / landscape settings.
One-click run of the pipeline in a background subprocess, with the live log streamed into the window and a Stop button.
Generated PDFs / CSVs listed in the app; double-click to open them in your system viewer.
Save / Load presets as JSON, and Reset to defaults.
Bundled NASA Exoplanet Archive catalog cache, desert-boundary / KDE aux files, and a sky-transmission FITS.
API Reference
License¶
SPINO is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. It reuses GUI widget code from GUIBRUSHR, which is GPLv3; as a derivative work SPINO is therefore also GPLv3. See GNU GPL v3.0 for details.