Occult Watcher 2.5
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When you first start OccultWatcher it will ask you to enter your site coordinates. You can also choose some general settings such as do you prefer distances to be shown in kilometres or miles, do you prefer the events to be displayed in local time or universal time and do you prefer the azimuth to be shown as degrees or as directions. If you choose the time to be shown as your local time (this is the default value) then your windows regional settings will be used to determine the local time. Occult Watcher will correctly adjust for the daylight savings time as well.
OccultWatcher supports two ways to list the events - Chronologically or Grouped by Feed. This is configured from the "Events Listing" option.
When the events are listed "Chronologically" it is possible that one event is defined in more than one feed but it will be still listed just once. In this case the more accurate prediction will be used. "IOTA Update" predictions are considered most accurate. For the rest of the feeds the more recent update will be considered more accurate.
In the "Group by Feed" mode all events are grouped by the feed that contains them.
If "My Events" are enabled then there will be group called "My Events" on the top which will include all events you have announced stations for or you have marked as "My Event".
The "Saved" button allows you to quickly switch your site with saved locations. This is a good way to check the events close to two different places such as your home and the dark observing site of your club.
To edit your saved locations choose "Edit saved sites" and then use the form to add/edit your saved sites.
On the "Event filers" you can filter the events displayed in Occult Watcher. The default filter will be used for all feeds for which no special filter is defined.
You can also define a specific filter to be used for a particular feed. To do this select the feed from the drop down (you must have subscribed for it and synchronized once in order to see it listed) and then check "Define custom filter" and define your filter.
On the "Other options" tab you can adjust the notification options, start up, synchronization and GoogleMap settings. Synchronization could happen Hourly, 6 Hourly or Daily. Depending on your screen resolution you may want to customize the GoogleMap frame size to fit your screen best. Also users in China can use the China version of the google maps.
From the "Prediction feeds" page you can subscribe for the available feeds. The "IOTA Updates" feeds cannot be deselected. On a right click there are extra options of Synchronising with the selected feed, purging its locally stored data or viewing some extra properties for this feed (OW technical information only)
Before you can announce your stations and collaborate for the asteroidal occultations observations you have to create an Observation Planner account. You can do this from the "Observation planner" tab. If you have an existing account you can set it to be used on a new installation of OccultWatcher or you can update your display name and password.
