Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of the observerly web application and API (the "Service"), operated by observerly Ltd, a company based in the United Kingdom ("observerly", "we", "us", or "our"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

The Observatory command-line software that you install on your own machines is licensed separately under our End User License Agreement. How we handle your personal data is described in our Privacy Policy.

You must be at least 16 years old to use the Service, and old enough to enter a binding contract where you live to buy a subscription. Access is by request, and we may accept or decline a request at our discretion.

Give us accurate details, keep your password secret, and tell us straight away at hello@observerly.com if you think someone else has used your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

Some features need a paid subscription. Subscriptions are sold by our reseller, Polar, which acts as merchant of record. Polar takes your payment, handles tax, and issues your receipts, and its own terms apply to the purchase.

• A subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel it.
• You can cancel at any time. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for.
• We will tell you before a price change applies to your subscription, so you can cancel first if you wish.
• Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer, including any right to cancel and receive a refund.

Your observatories, equipment, targets, plans, observations, and frames ("Your Content") belong to you. You give us a limited licence to host, store, copy, process, and display Your Content only to provide the Service to you. This licence ends when Your Content is deleted from the Service.

You confirm that you have the right to upload Your Content and that it does not break the law or anyone else's rights.

The Service can send commands to telescopes, mounts, cameras, roofs, and other equipment that you connect to it. You stay responsible for that equipment and for your site. Before you let the Service operate it, make sure that:

• its slew, altitude, and safety limits are set correctly;
• nothing can collide with it, and no one can be hurt by it; and
• you have weather and power safeguards that work without the Service.

Ephemerides, visibility windows, exposure estimates, plate solutions, and other calculations help you plan. They can contain errors, and we do not guarantee that an observation runs, that the sky is clear, or that a frame meets any standard of quality.

When you use the Service, do not:

• break the law, or help anyone else to break it;
• try to access accounts or data that are not yours, or probe, scan, or test the security of the Service without our written permission;
• send automated traffic that puts excessive load on the Service, or try to get around its rate limits;
• upload malware or anything else designed to cause harm; or
• resell or sublicense access to the Service without our agreement.

Parts of the Service use data from public astronomical archives, such as the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg and the Gaia archives. We do not control these services, and their availability, accuracy, and terms of use are their own. If you publish results that use their data, please follow their acknowledgement policies.

The Service, its software, design, and documentation belong to observerly Ltd and its licensors. The names observerly and Observatory, and our logos, are our trademarks. Open-source components remain under their own licences, and nothing in these terms limits your rights under them.

We are always improving the Service, so features may change, and we may sometimes take it offline for maintenance. We aim to keep it available, but we cannot promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors. If we plan to remove a feature that you pay for, we will tell you in advance.

You can stop using the Service at any time. To close your account, write to hello@observerly.com. Download any data you want to keep first, because we delete Your Content after your account closes, as our Privacy Policy describes.

We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, or if the law requires us to. Unless the matter is urgent or the law prevents it, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right.

Except as these terms say, we provide the Service "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including warranties of satisfactory quality and fitness for a particular purpose.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost observing time or lost data, or for damage to equipment that the Service operated within the limits you set. Our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim and £100.

If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss that you suffer as a foreseeable result of our breach of these terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill, and these terms do not affect your statutory rights.

We may update these terms as the Service changes. We will post the new version on this page and update the date at the top. If a change is material, we will email you before it takes effect. If you continue to use the Service after that, you accept the new terms.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer who lives in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts. We would always rather talk things through first.

observerly Ltd, United Kingdom.
hello@observerly.com