Modernizing observation planning for accessible, science-ready data

For 25 years, W. M. Keck Observatory has relied on observers to do their own planning for their observing nights. This would usually result in a starlist and a notion of what would be best to observe next based on the priority to the science they were conducting. Under the Data Services Initiative, this will become a required part of observing. The Database-Driven Observing Infrastructure aims to supplement the creation of science-ready data by carrying observation metadata throughout the observing process. The result is a file with all the data about the observation ready to be processed by the pipelines. In order to facilitate this, tools are being developed to help create better observing plans. One of the big complexities is that W. M. Keck Observatory currently supports ten active instruments with more on the horizon and no clear plan of retiring old instruments. With that in mind, the Database-Driven Observing Infrastructure system has been developed to be modular and instrument agnostic so that differences are abstracted from the system and handled only at the entrance and exit points of an observation. The benefit to this is that new instruments are easy to implement and old instruments are easy to update.