Schedule an appointment to have Solar Beacon point at you.

Solar Beacon on Sather Tower ( UC Berkeley “Campanile”) is ready to take reservations!

Click Here to schedule an appointment with Solar Beacon.

We recommend that you confirm that you can see the Berkeley Campanile. We have some MAPS which show the regions that are not blocked by foreground hills and islands.

You can schedule your own personal viewing of Solar Beacon. The viewings last about 3-4 minutes, but you can make as many as you like. You will have to enter your location and the exact time you will be at that location. Locations are entered via a Google Map tool. If you are in a building or up a tree, please estimate the height above ground level and enter that into the scheduler too.

For a listing of existing appointments on a given date, choose the date below and click on “View Appointments”

Note: you cannot make appointments at the :00 and :05 time slots after every hour, as they are reserved for public pointings.

Rules and Restrictions

There are a number of restrictions on where and when you can point. We will try to tell you if you are about to schedule a viewing that we cannot make, but we cannot cover all eventualities.

An event cannot be in the red shaded zone on the map
An event cannot be closer than 1500m (1mile) or further than 100km (60miles) from the Campanile
An event cannot be higher than 300m above the local ground level
You cannot have a time slot if it is currently taken
Appointments are made in 5 minute timeslots only. If you enter another time (eg. 12.59) it will be rounded down (eg. to 12:55).
You cannot have the :00 and :05 minute time slots as we reserve them for general public pointings
We cannot point to certain areas at certain times and we endeavor to tell you if you are about to make such a booking. Such points are anywhere from due North to due East from the Campanile.
We do not check that you can see the Campanile, or whether the sun will be shining, but we will tell you if you try to schedule a viewing while the sun is below the horizon.
When the sun, the Campanile and the observer are almost in a line, Solar Beacon will be very faint or invisible

Additionally, at the start of each day we schedule “fill in” events automatically if there are spare time slots. The link below (“Todays Schedule”) has the full schedule for today. You can consult the map and go to one of these pointings, however, we only guarantee the pointings at :30 and :35.

Todays scheduled viewing locations and times Click Here.