What’s new in Observation Manager 0.920?

As the first release candidate for 0.920 is available for download, it’s time to see what’s in the new version.

A minor change comes in the sorting of observation (and session) dates. In former releases the latest observation (session) was listed at the bottom of the left hand side navigation tree and the observation table.
With 0.920 the default sorting changed so that latest observations appear on the top of each list.

Another tiny change comes to the observer entries in the left hand navigation tree. All observations which were made as additional observer (via the session element), are now also listed below the corresponding observer. To indicate observations done by that observer and observations done as additional observer, the additional observer observations are shown in a light gray.

Another very useful new feature is the export of missing objects from a statistics result. In case you wanna observe all 110 Messier objects and there’re still some missing. In the past Observation Manager could tell you, how many observations are missing for your goal, but you couldn’t export that list and use it the other night. With 0.920 you’ll get the ability to export a list of missing objects either to XML (<OAL> format) or to HTML.

Talking about statistics…if you’ve an observation project ongoing (say the Herschel 400) any you want to get some statistics on your project (How many objects have been observed?), you can now create observation projects (like the Herschel 400) for Observation Manager. Basically the observation project is a plain TXT list passed over to Observation Manager, who’ll be able to compute statistics from that list. As a first out-of-the-box project the DeepSky extension comes along with a Herschel 400 project file.
More on observation projects, in one of the next blogs. So stay tuned…

Needless to say that 0.920 has again several bug fixes and usage enhancements onboard.
E.g. while loading/exporting/saving/… you’ll get a little animated wait pop-up to let you know, OM is working.
Also the column sizes and the size of the main window frames are now saved and recovered during the next startup.
The DeepSky extension now comes with the revised NGC/IC catalog by Wolfgang Steinicke, that replaces the outdated HCNGC.

So there’s plenty of reasons to download the next version of Observation Manager. The release candidate is out, and we’re curious to receive your feedback!