Implemented features

lukas_demetz

In the last days we made several improvements to our system, mostly due to the feedback of our customers. I will try to keep track of them here:

Payment via Paypal is now supposed to work automatically. Up to now I had to register manually the payments, which would result in delays when I was fast asleep 😅 Now it should work like with the Stripe payments.
Plenty of work has been put into the correct display of timings in the Imaging Request Creator. Please let me know if you find anything off. It is a pain to do this with Javascript, but well, I wanted so 🙂
Also, there is a pending issue with the calculated altitudes in the Request Creator. I a on it, probabily this will need more work than planned. Just ignore it as it is currently very often off.
Logging: The logs coming from the observatories are displayed in real time as long as you are logged in the Dashboard. I am working on making them more permanent, also for later reference.
Observatory Status: Everybody can now see in near realtime the work done on the single observatories, including the latest preview images.
Imaging Requests are now editable (even if in the background this basically deletes the old one and creates a new one 🙂 )

Feel free to post feature requests. I am doing my best to keep up with the thread here as well as the mails coming in.

Lukas

lukas_demetz

Added today:

Ability to resubmit failed imaging requests
Synchronization of paused plans from the observatory
Automatic removal of fixedTime requests which have not been executed (start time is way in the past)

lukas_demetz

Added today:
-Feature: Imaging Requests can now be set to be repeated during the night at given intervals. Ideal for asteroid observations

Feature: You can now duplicate an existing imaging request instead of "only" editing it
Bugfix: User preferences regarding emails were not always correctly saved and applied, this should now be fixed. If you have plenty of short plans this might be a good feature to turn off too many emails coming in 😅
Bugfix: Preview altitude of coordinates for tonight works now correctly (finally) after switching to server-side calculations. I will add a graph and some live preview for existing Imaging Requests later on

lukas_demetz

Update for today:

Feature: Finally the altitude graph is back, and seems to work correctly.
Bugfix: I messed up some internal logging yesterday which caused Imaging Requests to not be saved correctly. It's fixed now.
Feature: Added filtering possibility for observations. Also, archived Observations still show up.

lukas_demetz

New for today:

Feature: You can now choose to automatically resubmit failed plans. These can fail for a variety of reasons, mostly due to bad weather or guiding issues.

lukas_demetz

New for today:

I added an integration with MailChimp. In the future, we may use this to send out information to our customers. You can opt-in and opt-out of this with the user settings function in the Dashboard.
Feature: Now you cen set a minimum Altitude for your Imaging Request to be taken

lukas_demetz

Feature: Show a warning message if the Imaging Request you are editing might consume more points than you have available.

lukas_demetz

Separated the weather status page into it's own submenu.
Did some cleanup in the backend to make my life easier 🙂
Added some minor informations while setting up an Imaging Request (like, if the connection to the observatory is broken or the likes)

lukas_demetz

Upcoming:

Warning on repeating plans if times are too tight to be executed
Better calculation of needed time for a fixed time request
AutoFocus between repeats
Back-to-back repeats

lukas_demetz

Fixed a stupid logic error when submitting the Imaging Request to the observatory. This caused mostly less than wanted number of frames to be taken.

lukas_demetz

Huge change for the calendar: Now we can preview also splitted plans correctly. There may lurk some more bugs there, so please report if you find anything odd.
Moved some fields in Request Creator to a new "Advanced" section to clean it up a bit

lukas_demetz

Added a temporary fix so that the dashboard works with Safari.

lukas_demetz

Finally fixed the time display of the Dashboard, works now also under Safari, Chrome, Edge and Firefox (yay!)
New warning if a target is too low to be decently imaged.
First iteration of showing reasons to why an imaging request is not proceeding. This needs alot more testing, but it is a good starting point

lukas_demetz

Changed the behaviour for short exposures (< 60 seconds): We will not produce preview images anymore, as it is time consuming and normally you want the frames to be taken in quick succession

lukas_demetz

Added the possibility to defocus the field (for photometry)
Added an option to only image a subframe (to accelerate the download)
Added an option to disable the creation of preview images. This also saves time for time-critical series.

lukas_demetz

Added a few fixes today:

Most importantly, sometimes the deletion of plans doesn't work correctly. Now we check this regularily so that if there has been a network issue, deleted plans will be deleted correctly at the observatory. This should avoid duplicated imaging requests

lukas_demetz

Hello,
today I added quite a few functions:

Bulk request uploader, as noted in a separated post
Request Wizard now shows also the underlying calculation for the effective time needed, this is especially useful to figure out why a fixed time request doesn't seem to work out

lukas_demetz

Okay, some mayor changes today:

Finally added a "price multiplier" for each observatory. This was needed as some of the new scopes will have a lower hourly rate compared to the iDK currently used in Namibia. For example, the upcoming 16" photometric system will have a lower price. Quite simply, the hourly rate used to calculate the cost for every frame will be multiplied by this factor 😀
Started cleaning up the code in the backend
Added some more senseful handling of offline observatories. If the observatory missed its heartbeat signal for longer, we won't try to send the imaging request to the observatory while creating a new one. Instead, we will keep trying to submit it periodically. This should fix also some more sporadic database problems that we face from time to time

lukas_demetz

Okay, big news today:

Finally, you won't be constrained anymore by how many filters you can use: Now it is possible to make one request with several frames taken with different exposure times:
Thi sis great news if you need to test the system and see which exposure time fits your goal best.
Please note that, while we run our test suite against it, there might be some issues. Please make sure you reload the page as otherwise some errors might happen.
Smaller cosmetic corrections

lukas_demetz

Added a preset function: Now, you can set up your imaging request, and then save all* settings for future use as a preset.
It will be saved into your user profile and you will be able to use it in other imaging requests. This is very convenient for photometric requests and all those that need careful selection of settings.

*Well, not all settings: Target name, coordinates, fixed Time, mpc Code and observatory are not saved with the preset for obvious reasons 😃