First Steps

Notice about the Polaris version

This documentation is for the beta version of Polaris.

Last updated 2025-10-21

First, Login

If you haven't registered with and logged-in to Polaris please do so now. In the following guide we are logged in as "John Flamsteed" as an obvious fake user.

Create a new proposal

To create a new Proposal click on the Create new proposal + button on your home page. This is highlighted by the red circle in the screenshot below.

Please notice that this screenshot is in dark-mode. You may select light-mode by clicking the toggle button in the very top right of the window, left of the "user management" button. When in dark-mode the button will be a "sun", meaning go-to light-mode, and when in light-mode it will be a "crescent-moon", meaning got-to dark-mode. The following screenshot shows what light-mode looks like.

Switch to which ever mode you want. The author of this guide prefers dark-mode so that is the mode the rest of the screenshots will show.

After clicking the Create new proposal + button you will be taken to the new proposal form page.

Fill in the proposal details form and click Save

The basic details of an Observing Proposal are the title, a brief Summary, and the "kind" of your proposal either STANDARD, SURVEY, or T.O.O. (target-of-opportunity). The Summary is limited to 1000 characters. These values can be edited after you create the proposal. Please note that we have help buttons located on the top right of most pages - a blue question mark in a hexagonal border - that will drop down some basic textual help for the current page. If a page does not have this button the help will be located in a tab on the page somewhere.

The Proposal Overview

Now that you have a created a new proposal you can see its Overview by clicking the dropdown menu for the relevant proposal in the navigation pane on the left, and clicking on the Overview tab.

In the screenshot example we have given our proposal the title An awesome proposal title, filled in the summary with a very brief summary, and assigned it a Kind of STANDARD. Notice that, as the creator of the new proposal, you will have been automatically assigned the PI, or Principal Investigator role for the proposal.

Proposal Services

You will notice three buttons at the top of the overview page, namely Export Proposal, Clone Proposal, and Delete Proposal.

Export Proposal provides a downloadable zip file containing this proposal as JSON, any supporting documents you may have uploaded, and a screenshot of this overview. The astute among you will have realised this is the file you then upload when you click on the button Import existing proposal. The intention of this is to allow you to transfer proposals between different instanced of the Polaris application.

Clone Proposal creates a deep copy of the current proposal as a new proposal i.e., everything is copied - targets, technical goals, observations, justifications, supporting documents, ...

Delete Proposal will permanently remove the proposal from the system. Notice that if the proposal has been submitted to a Proposal Cycle the Submitted Proposal, which is a separate entity to the currently active proposal, is NOT removed from the cycle. Submitted Proposals can be thought of as a "snapshot" of the proposal, frozen at the point of submission. We would recommend that you don't delete proposals that are actively submitted to a cycle i.e., under review, but this is not a restriction.

Next Steps: adding Targets and Technical Goals

If you now try to go to the Observations tab you will be presented with the following page:

In the Polaris app you must first add at least one observational Target and at least one Technical Goal before you can generate an Observation for your proposal. Notice that the yellow text in the screenshot is a link to take you to the corresponding page in the App.

For the next steps in this guide, please go to either Adding Targets or Adding Technical Goals, the order here does not matter. The Building an Observation guide assumes you have added at least one target and at least one technical goal to your proposal.