In June, LCO will unveil a new observing portal, the interface through which you interact with the Network. This new portal has been developed (under the codename "Valhalla") over many months. We expect that the re-designed portal will be easier for you to use: to compose observation requests, to check the status of those requests, to retrieve your data, and to monitor the hours remaining for your science project. The big change for us here at LCO is that the new portal will be easier for our software team to maintain and improve.
You can get a sneak preview of the new portal by checking out the new version of LCO's "Getting Started" guide, which is now linked to the Documentation page of the website. It's labeled "June 2017 edition", and it includes screen shots of many of the new displays.
For those of you who interact with the Network through the APIs: those will also be changed (somewhat) when the new portal is unveiled. There will be a transition period during which the current APIs will continue to work. Information on the API changes will be posted on the Developers page soon.
You may have noticed that LCO's telescopes in South Africa were offline for several nights. A computer died on May 19. Our IT team tenaciously pursued the problem; the support staff at Sutherland replaced the malfunctioning hardware, and the software was rebuilt. The telescopes in South Africa were making science observations again on the night of 2017-05-24.
