Publishing your chart
saves tonight’s chart as an image as the night goes on, and can send it to your website.
Tonight’s chart
Choose where to save it. The same file is replaced after every reading, so a web page can always point at one address. It is written in a way that means anything reading it never sees a half-finished image.
There is no default location. On an observatory computer the obvious place is often already used by another program, and two programs replacing one image would fight over it.
Only between sunset and sunrise is on by default, so your published image isn't replaced at noon by an empty chart. Nothing is written until the night’s first reading, so last night’s chart stays up until then.
The published chart has its own style, separate from what you see on screen, and the window shows a preview. Two extras can be turned on:
| Sky bands | Shades the chart in the Bortle classes, so a visitor who has never heard of mpsas can still see what kind of sky it was. |
|---|---|
| Moon altitude | The moon’s height while it was up. See the moon. |
The reading card
A small square image with the latest reading in large type, its Bortle class, the time, and the night so far behind it. A full chart is hard to read on a phone or in a sidebar; the card isn't. It is saved and uploaded alongside the chart, to its own file.
The card always says indicative band for one reading, not a site classification, because a class shown on a web page is easily taken as a verdict on the site.
Uploading
| Where | FTP, FTPS, SFTP or Amazon S3. Use Test connection to check the details before you rely on them. |
|---|---|
| How often | After every reading, or at most once every so many minutes. |
| What | The chart, the reading card and the reading log, each switched on separately. |
| Remote name | Leave blank to keep the file’s own name. A fixed name is replaced each time, so a web page can use one address. Date it adds the night’s date and keeps every file. |
An upload can never cost you a reading. Each reading is saved before the image is drawn, and the image is saved before anything is sent. A slow or broken server can't hold up the next reading.
A failed upload is tried again after a growing pause. Only the newest file waits, so an hour offline leaves one upload to catch up, not twelve. When sampling stops, a final update is always sent.
Passwords and keys are encrypted with Windows before they are saved, so the settings file is useless on another computer or to another user. For Amazon S3, use an access key that can only upload to that one bucket and folder.