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Terms of Service

Use of any LCO facilities and/or data implies acceptance of these terms of use.

Essential information

  • LCO may store information about you to make each of your visits more efficient and to provide a richer user experience, but we will never send unsolicited emails and will not make your details available to anyone outside of LCO for any purpose.

Data Use Policy

  • All images and data derived from observations made at LCO facilities are made available for scientific or educational use, subject to the Creative Commons license BY-NC 2.0 and in the case of science data, subject to an additional proprietary period.
  • All science data will have a default proprietary access period (normally 1 year from the date of observation, though the principal investigator can request a shorter period), after which the data can be shared according to the creative commons license.
  • The LCO Observatory Director can waive or modify the proprietary period in exceptional circumstances where it is in the best interests of the observatory for the data to be public.
  • All education and outreach data are public with no proprietary period and can be shared according to a creative commons license.
  • Any images published either online or otherwise must bear an appropriate credit line or acknowledgement to LCO and the file headers preserved.

Privacy Policy

For information about  our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data, please read our Privacy Policy page.

Confidentiality

Individual user records are regarded as confidential and therefore will not be divulged to any third party, other than if legally required to do so to the appropriate authorities.

We will not sell, share, or rent your personal information to any third party or use your e-mail address for unsolicited mail. Any emails sent by LCO will only be in connection with the provision of agreed services and products.

Log Files

We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information. Additionally, for systems administration, detecting usage patterns and troubleshooting purposes, our web servers automatically log standard access information including browser type, access times/open mail, URL requested, and referral URL. This information is not shared with third parties and is used only within LCO on a need-to-know basis. Any individually identifiable information related to this data will never be used in any way different to that stated above without your explicit permission.

Cookies

Like most interactive web sites the LCO website uses cookies to enable us to retrieve user details for each visit. Cookies are used in some areas of our site to enable the functionality of this area and ease of use for those people visiting.

Links from this website

We do not monitor or review the content of other party’s websites which are linked to from this website. Opinions expressed or material appearing on such websites are not necessarily shared or endorsed by us and LCO should not be regarded as the publisher of such opinions or material. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices, or content, of these sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site & to read the privacy statements of these sites. You should evaluate the security and trustworthiness of any other site connected to this site or accessed through this site yourself, before disclosing any personal information to them. LCO will not accept any responsibility for any loss or damage in whatever manner, howsoever caused, resulting from your disclosure to third parties of personal information.

Availability

On occasion our services may be unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances. LCO staff will make all reasonable efforts to address any outage in a timely manner.

Booked Real Time slots are subject to change or cancellation should higher priority observations be required on the booked telescope resource.