Recording
Record by pressing a button, or let the application start and stop on its own every night.
By hand
Press Start Sampling on the main window. A reading is taken every Sample every seconds (in ) until you press Stop Sampling. Every reading is saved straight away.
On a schedule
Turn on . Two settings decide the window:
| Times from: the sun | Start and stop are worked out from your site every night, so the window follows the seasons by itself. The default. Needs your observing site. |
|---|---|
| Times from: fixed clock times | The same two times all year. Needs no site, but a window that suits November is daylight in June. |
When the times come from the sun, Between chooses which sun events:
| Sunset and sunrise | The widest window. The default. |
|---|---|
| Civil dusk and dawn | Sun 6° below the horizon. Bright stars are out; the sky is not yet dark. |
| Nautical dusk and dawn | Sun 12° below. |
| Astronomical dusk and dawn | Sun 18° below: true night. The narrowest window. |
The Options window shows tonight’s start and stop times for whatever you choose, so you can see what each one means before you pick.
Record wide, look narrow. Sunset to sunrise is the default because a reading that was never taken can't be recovered later, while extra twilight readings cost nothing. The statistics already count only true night (see what is counted), whatever you record.
If you start or stop sampling by hand during a scheduled window, the application respects that until the window’s next start or stop, and the main window says manual override meanwhile.
Starting with Windows
Turn on . With the schedule on, an observatory computer then looks after itself: after a restart the application opens when you sign in, and starts recording when the night’s window opens.
It starts when you sign in, not when the computer switches on. A computer that restarts to the sign-in screen, after a Windows update for example, runs nothing until someone signs in. If your observatory computer has to recover from a restart with nobody there, turn on automatic sign-in in Windows.
You can also see and turn off this setting in Task Manager, under Startup apps. Uninstalling removes it.