Hi there,

something that lingered for a long time was the responsiveness of the page: On tablets and (worse) on phones, it looked "meh" and wasn't usable that much. I went through the most common issues, now it should work relatively well. Let me know if you encounter any more issues.

11 days later

Hi,
further small improvements:

  • The preset function was not working due to an issue with Github; works now again
  • Fixed time observations: When creating or editing the calendar, a better error message is given in case there is an overlap with other observations, dusk, dawn, or daylight
  • Improved the status messages coming from the observatories (Like constraints and errors)
  • Small improvements to the calendar
6 days later
  • Plenty of small improvmenets done to the web interface
  • The asteroid/comet search had an internal glitch which caused some names to be interpreted as "not found". This has been fixed.
  • Also, the Updater for the MPC data (MPCORB and CometsEls) for some reason didn't run correctly, so the data was obsolete. Now it is being updated daily in the afternoon
    -
  • A tricky, well-hidden stupid bug caused sometimes to have false calculations for fixed time plans, falsely claiming they would need a very long time. Has been fixed
11 days later
  • Fixed an odd issue that caused under rare circumstances for a request to be executed twice
  • Fixed FOV display when editing requests. Now it displays the correct FOV
a month later
17 days later

Hi there,
back to working on the features. I've added:

  • A checkbox to disable the preview generation
  • A checbox to disable platesolving the final images

Both are useful if you need a quick cadence, i.e. short overhead times between frames. Both preview generation as well as platesolving take some time (especially with the huge images from the Veloce in Namibia) to complete and the next frame won't be taken before these two steps are done. Disabling them speeds up imaging considerabily. Please note that pointing might suffer during long plans, so be careful when using it.

5 days later

Hi there,

today I added a few features which might be interesting:

  • The currently running request is shown for each observatory. The initials of the respective user is also shown 😄
  • We do a few more checks to avoid the deletion of an actively running project. The system will try to pause it now. This still needs work, as currently the currently running request will continue until it ends or the current split is done
a month later

Ok I found out some smaller glitches when pausing/unpausing requests and resubmitting failed frames. This has now been solved.

    Okay, I fixed the underlying problem (which had to do with caching of some .JS files). Now and from now on the updates should propagate with a simple refresh of the page 😄

    Another small fix:

    • When paying with PayPal, the system showed the agreement for a subscription. We always used the system for making one-time payments, and we finally found the issue. Paypal should now behave correctly, treating the transaction as single, one-time events.
    • An overlooked bug (no, it's not a feature 😉 ) has been fixed: Until now, Imaging Requests that had been deleted left the single Observations without the possibility to ask for a refund. Particularily, even if a user already asked for a refund, those requests disappeared also on our Backend 😅 . This has been fixed. New behaviour is that a refund can be asked using the User Interface up to 7 days after image acquisition or archivation.

    Also added a small indication about the load of each observatory. This can be useful if one wants to have an idea about how long it might take for a Request to be taken, and also to choose an observatory with less load.

    • Added an indication about the lowest usable altitude of each observatory:
      • Also, the altitude preview when inserting a target shows the observatory limit