This version of the HSpot Users' Guide has been prepared by Mark Kidger at the Herschel Science Centre. The instrument chapters have been prepared by the Instrument Calibration Scientists for PACS (Roland Vavrek and Bruno Altieri), SPIRE (initially Sarak Leeks and Ivan Valtchanov; more recently, Ivan Valtchanov and Luca Conversi) and HIFI (Tony Marston and David Teyssier), at the Herschel Science Centre.

HSpot has been a development that has been largely based on the Spot tool created by the Spitzer Science Center for observation planning and proposals for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. We are extremely grateful to the original SPOT developers.

The HSpot Users' Guide has been based on the excellent Spot User's Guide produced by the Spitzer Science Center Observer Support Team (especially Nancy Silbermann) and adapted initially for HSpot by Tony Marston at the Herschel Science Centre.

The work of adapting Spot for Herschel's needs was largely the development work of one person, Andrew Bonfield, at ESTEC. Andrew's contribution to HSpot was vital over the years of initial development of HSpot.

From June 2007 to May 2008 the work of maintaining HSpot was taken over by Kevin Phipps, who then handed over to the current custodian, Rafael Andres (Harry Potter), who was for the early years of the mission assisted by Antonio Villacorta; it was their job to implement the rapid changes that were required as planning observations with HSpot passed from being a theoretical exercise on the ground to an observational reality in space. In Spring 2009 Rafa and Antonio were joined by Fran Vallejo, who also contributed to HSpot maintanence for much of the first three years of the mission. Daniel Galan supports and maintains the underlying HCSS structure, while Paolo Pesciullesi supports the Versant databases used in proposal handling and observation scheduling.

Many people have been involved in the development of the Herschel Astronomical Observing Templates (AOTs) and associated time estimators at various institutions. This has been a joint effort between ESA and the three instrument building teams.