Console

The Console is for active equipment control — taking a test shot, slewing to a target, moving the focuser, switching filters, driving the cooler, opening the roof. It's the page you'll spend most time on outside of running sequences.

Across the top you get three global buttons — Connect all, Disconnect all, and Halt all — plus a live safety badge. Under those runs a status bar showing safety state, how many devices are connected (e.g. "4/6 connected"), and key weather at a glance (sky−ambient, wind, humidity, sky brightness, reading age).

What's there

The page is a grid of cards:

• Camera — object name, filter, exposure, binning, gain, light/dark frame, and a Capture button (with Abort). The filter field auto-populates as a dropdown from the connected wheel, or falls back to a free-text label if no wheel is detected. Gain/binning left blank fall back to your configured camera defaults. A progress bar tracks the running exposure.

- Cooling (folded into the Camera card, shown only when a camera with temperature control is connected) — live sensor temp, setpoint, Δ from setpoint, and cooler power %. You can set a target temperature (optionally ramped over N minutes instead of slamming the setpoint), turn the cooler on/off, or Warm up (ramps back toward ambient, then switches the cooler off). - Rotator (folded into the Camera card) — move to an absolute angle, "Solve & rotate to PA" (plate-solves the field and rotates to a target sky position angle), and Halt. Buttons are disabled until a rotator is connected.

• Last captured frame — a live preview of the most recent frame, with HFD (focus-quality, colour-coded so you can judge focus at a glance) and star-count readouts in the card header. A small toolbar carries Zoom (toggle; Esc resets), Center here (click the icon, then click a point on the image — Starship plate-solves the frame and precise-slews so that point becomes the new centre), and Show last image (loads a science frame held back during a run). Double-click the preview to enlarge it.

• Mount & Pointing — RA/Dec entry, Slew, Sync, and Abort slew; Park, Unpark, Track on/off, and a Go home button (shown only when the mount reports homing support). A live line shows the mount's current RA/Dec and state. It also carries several sub-tools:

- Plate solve — pick a FITS file (or "Solve latest"), then Solve, Blind solve (whole-sky, for loaded/archived frames), or Solve & sync (solve and immediately sync the pointing model without moving). A solved result offers GoTo, Precise GoTo, and Sync-from-solved-position follow-ups. The ASTAP-ready badge shows whether the solver is available. - Target — type an object name (M42, NGC 7000, Vega…), resolve it to coordinates via Sesame, then GoTo or Precise GoTo. When the Sesame servers cannot be reached (no internet, or a Windows PC that has never met CDS's certificate authority in a browser), NGC / IC / Messier numbers and the common names in the built-in OpenNGC catalogue are resolved offline and labelled so; a mirror whose certificate the PC cannot verify is used over plain http, and the answer says which mirror failed and why.

• Focuser — absolute move, relative move with quick-step buttons (±10 / ±100 / ±1000), and Halt. A live line shows position, motion, and temperature. "Diagnose focuser" reports exactly what Starship sees, to help track down a focuser that won't move. The Autofocus row runs Adaptive First Light, the V-curve Wizard, and Refocus (with a filter dropdown so you can focus through a chosen filter), plus "Go to focus" (return to the last saved focus position) and "Clear cal". A badge shows whether autofocus has been calibrated for this setup.

• Observatory — roof/shutter state, park, and azimuth, with Open roof / Close roof buttons. Opening is refused unless safety is confirmed SAFE; closing warns if the mount isn't parked. (Full dome rotation, homing, and slit-slaving are driven from the Dome page.)

• All-sky — the latest all-sky camera snapshot, with a Refresh button.

• Power — per-outlet switches from a connected ISwitch/power device: analog readouts (volts/amps/watts/temperature) shown as tiles, and relays with On/Off toggles. If no power device is connected, a Connect button appears. Turning a switch OFF asks for confirmation first.

• Flat device — cover state, calibrator state, and brightness for a CoverCalibrator: Open/Close cover, and Light ON (at a chosen brightness) / Light OFF. Controls that don't apply to your device (no cover, or no calibrator light) are disabled.

• CCTV — a display-only grid of any configured CCTV cameras.

• Guiding (PHD2) — read-only guiding status: connection, app state, RMS (total/RA/Dec), SNR, star-lost, settling, and last event. Open PHD2 with its server enabled and Starship connects automatically.

• Jobs — every long-running operation (capture, slew, autofocus, cooler ramp…) as a live progress list.

• Starship Monitor and Event log — the running command/audit log (downloadable) and the last 50 system events.

Connect all / Disconnect all

Connect all brings up every configured device (and launches + connects PHD2). Disconnect all stands them back down. Both run as a visible step-by-step sequence so you can see what connected and what didn't.

Safety gating

By design, most of the Console is not gated by the safety supervisor. Capture, slew, focus, filter, cooler, rotator, plate solve — all proceed regardless of weather, because they don't expose the observatory to the elements; the roof is closed either way.

The commands that ARE gated are the ones that open the observatory to the sky:

• Open roof / shutter is hard-refused unless the supervisor confirms conditions are SAFE. UNSAFE and UNKNOWN both block it (if we can't confirm conditions, we fail closed), and there is deliberately no override.
• Close roof / shutter refuses if the mount isn't parked (a closing roof can strike the OTA) unless you confirm; if your config asks to park on close, it parks the mount first.

Halt all

Stops what's moving right now: it aborts any mount slew, halts the focuser, and aborts any in-flight exposure. It does not park the mount, turn off the cooler, or stop the rotator — that's intentional. Halt is a "stop what you're doing right now" command, not "shut everything down". You can exclude the focuser from Halt all via a [focuser] setting, a workaround for focusers that mishandle a mid-move halt.

Jobs

Long-running operations (capture, slew, autofocus, cooler ramp, precise slew…) run as background jobs. The Console shows job progress in real time, and you can issue another command while a job is running.