I made several changes to Whats Interesting in the last couple of weeks including an option to track the object and a help page explaining it all. Also I corrected an issue where setting the time in KStars ( at least on OS X ) to go any faster than 1 hour intervals made it very slow to respond to user input. Next, I set astrometry to use the config file specified by the user in the settings instead of whatever astrometry uses for its config file by default. I also worked with Jasem to correct some of the missing objects that were printing errors to the console on KStars startup, but you probably won't see most of the missing objects changes unless you replace your data directory since most of them were issues in the KStars data files. There have also been a number of little bug fixes here and there.
But one of the biggest things I did was something I finished yesterday and for now it is a Mac only feature due to a permissions issue on Linux. I added a downloader for the astrometry index files. So if you are In Ekos and you go to the the Align module, and you click on the "edit solver options" button, then go to the Index files page, you will find a list of the index files with checkboxes next to them. A few months ago, I wrote the code for this to make it display which index files you have installed on your system and which ones are recommended for your current configuration. This week I made those checkboxes clickable so that you can uncheck a box to delete the index file from your computer and you can check the box to download an index file you want to install. I added a warning so that just in case you uncheck a box you didn't want to delete, it will at least warn you before you delete the index file(s). Also, I included a function that will check for a live connection to the server before trying to download the file and it displays a warning for the users letting them know why it cannot download the index file(s).
Please test this dmg, especially the astrometry index downloader feature!
Thanks Stephane. If you are using a remote indiserver running on another computer, don't forget to update that too. There were some changes to INDI in the last couple of months. I forgot to update INDI on my raspberry pi and last night we had the first good clear night in ages. So I spent a significant chunk of good imaging time updating the software on the pi. If I had thought about it sooner, I could have easily done that in the daytime beforehand. . .
I set my systems to auto update. So far it's working great bar the odd crashes from time to time.
I had a crash while trying to set up the horizon limits earlier, nothing serious, a one off crash.
Thanks Rob,
I tested all new features and they're working well. I checked more in depth the new astrometry features by adding a new scope configuration (with a different FOV). the new optical features were recognized and new index files were recommended accordingly. Deleting files by unchecking them and lack of connectivity warning worked as well. Excellent work as usual.
Remember, some of them are actually quite a few files, and some of them are very big. The ones at the top should definitely download with no problem. the farther down you go, the longer it will take. I currently set a timeout for individual files of 1 minute, in case a download has a problem, but we will need to see if that is too short. If the index gets grayed out or disabled, that means it is trying to download. If it comes back and is NOT checked, that means it timed out.You could always try again. If there is no connection, it should not even try, i.e. if you check it, it should immediately uncheck and give you a warning that it cannot connect.
Looking at your screenshot, it appears you are downloading both 4207 and 4208. From my experiments, it seems to me that downloads wait until the other is finished. I had hoped that they would download simultaneously, not sequentially. If you are using the smaller files (the ones at the top), you can check them at the same time and it will not be an issue. But if you check more than one at the bottom at the same time, there is a good chance one will time out while waiting in "line". I might have to play around with the timeout feature. I think it is important in case a download never completes, but maybe it should be a longer time.
ah, I had not noticed the * in the file name... doh... that means several files are being downloaded. That explains why it seems slow.
I thought it was just one file.
Based on what you said, it might be good to include some where the number of files that will be downloaded. I at least think that it would be good to include the file sizes. See what you think about this screenshot. Does this help?