Starting

First, Login

If you haven't registered with and logged-in to Polaris please do so now.

Click the Create a new proposal button

This will bring up the new Proposal details form.

Fill in the proposal details form and click Create

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). These attributes can be changed after you create the proposal.

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 (literally), 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 (in the example we used for the screenshots, the username is also PI; nobody said we had to be inventive).

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 follow either the Adding Targets link or the Adding Technical Goals link, the order here does not matter. The Building Observations page assumes you have added at least one target and at least one technical goal to your proposal.