Repository navigation
Live Monitoring
Live Monitoring is the operational view of PFR Sentinel: the latest processed frame, its histogram, and a running feed of activity. Around it, the app bar, status strip, and telemetry bar are visible on every tab and give an at-a-glance picture of the camera, the sky, and the outputs. This page describes all of those, along with the window layout and navigation rail.
From top to bottom the window has:
- App bar: app name, pipeline status animation, notification bell, and the main Start/Stop button.
- Status strip: tiles for Web, Discord, Roof, Sky, Weather, and Seeing, plus the capture/camera state.
- Content area: the navigation rail on the left, then the page content.
- Telemetry bar: disk space and the latest frame's exposure, gain, sensor temperature, and capture time.
How the content area is used depends on the page selected in the navigation rail:
| Selected page | Layout |
|---|---|
| Live Monitoring | The preview fills the whole content area. The histogram, activity feed, and performance line are hidden to give the image maximum room. |
| Capture, Image Processing, All-Sky, Meteor Tracker, Output, Timelapse, Logs | The live panel (preview, histogram, activity feed) on the left and the selected page's settings on the right. Drag the divider between them to resize; the split is remembered. |
| Overlays, Library, Settings | The selected page fills the content area and the live panel is hidden. The Overlays page has its own preview. |
The app reopens on the page you were last using.
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| App name | PFR Sentinel icon and name. |
| Pipeline status | A small animation that appears while a session is running and shows which stage the current frame is at. Hover it for a description: "Waiting for new image", "Capturing exposure", "Calibrating camera", "Applying histogram stretch", "Processing image", or "Sending to outputs". |
| Notifications | Bell icon with a badge counting the notifications in the list. Click it to open the notifications list (see below). |
| Main action button | Changes with the app's state (see below). |
| Button | When shown | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Connect Camera | ZWO camera mode with no camera detected | Searches for connected ZWO cameras. |
| Start Capture | A camera is available, or directory watch mode is selected | Starts capture or directory watching. |
| Stop (red) | While capturing | Stops capture. |
In directory watch mode, Start Capture is greyed out until a valid watch folder is set. Hover it to see why: "Set a valid watch directory on the Capture tab".
Click the bell to open a list of recent in-app notifications, newest first. Each entry shows the message and the time it was added (HH:MM:SS in UTC, not your local time), with a coloured bar on the left: accent colour for information, amber for warnings, and red for errors. The list shows up to 30 entries, and the app keeps the most recent 50. Click the bin icon (Clear all) to empty the list and reset the badge.
Examples of notifications:
- Capture started or stopped, capture failures, and camera errors
- Camera detection results and USB camera revive attempts
- Web server started, or failed to start
- Timelapse finalizing and saved
- An update is available
- Settings problems found at startup
- Running without Administrator rights (USB camera recovery is limited)
- NINA plugin install/remove results and out-of-date plugin warnings
The band below the app bar shows live observatory status. Tiles that have nothing to show read Not configured.
| Tile | Shows |
|---|---|
| WEB | On when the web server is running, Starting… when it is enabled but not yet running, Off when disabled. See Web Server. |
| DISCORD | On or Off, following the Discord setting on the Output tab. |
| ROOF | Open (green) or Closed (red) from the roof classifier. Turns amber and reads Open · unreliable or Closed · unreliable when the frame is only sensor noise, with Too much static on the Sky tile (new in the next release; see ML Models). Needs ML models enabled; see ML Models. |
| SKY | Sky condition from the sky classifier: Clear (green), Partly Cloudy (amber), or other conditions such as Overcast (red). Shows Roof closed while the roof is closed, because the camera can't see the sky. Shows Exposure too short or No stars detected when the frame was judged not to show a night sky (new in the next release; see When the overlay is drawn). Needs ML models enabled for the sky condition; the two gate messages appear without them. |
| WEATHER | Temperature, condition, and cloud cover from OpenWeatherMap, e.g. "12.0°C · Clear · 20%". Needs an API key and a location or coordinates in Settings. The tile keeps updating while capture is stopped, and dims if the weather data is more than 30 minutes old (for example, an invalid API key or no internet). |
| SEEING | Star count and FWHM from star detection, e.g. "412 stars · FWHM 2.3". Shows — until the first reading arrives, Roof closed while the roof is closed, and — again while the Sky tile reports Exposure too short or No stars detected, because star detection is skipped on those frames. |
Roof, Sky, and Seeing are updated with each processed frame and are dimmed while capture is stopped, so you can tell a live reading from the last known one.
At the right-hand end, the capture/camera pill shows:
| State | Display |
|---|---|
| Capturing | Green CAPTURE pill with "Capturing · frame N", counting frames captured since the app started. The count goes up when a frame is captured, before it has been processed. |
| Idle | CAMERA "Connected · idle" |
| No camera | Red CAMERA "Disconnected" (or "Camera error" after a camera failure) |
The Preview card shows the most recently processed frame, scaled to fit while keeping its aspect ratio, with your overlays drawn on it. Depending on your All-Sky Overlay settings, the all-sky overlay can appear in the preview without being added to saved or published images. If you crop your outputs with Output Framing on the Image Processing tab, the preview shows the cropped image.
During each exposure, a thin progress bar appears under the Preview heading, and a countdown at the top right shows the time remaining (in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes).
- Scroll the mouse wheel over the image to zoom in or out, centred on the cursor, up to 8×.
- Click and drag to pan while zoomed in.
- Double-click to return to the full view.
Zoom and pan are for inspection only and don't change the output. The zoom level is kept as new frames arrive, so you can watch one area of the sky.
When there is no live frame, a message is shown over the preview:
- No camera connected: "Connect a ZWO ASI camera, or choose a directory to watch for incoming frames."
- Capture stopped: the last frame stays on screen with "Showing last frame" and its capture time.
The message clears as soon as a new frame arrives.
The Histogram card plots the red, green, and blue channels of the latest frame, measured before the stretch is applied, so it reflects what the camera actually recorded.
In ZWO camera mode with auto-exposure turned on, two extra markers are drawn:
| Marker | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Yellow dashed line labelled Target: N | The auto-exposure target brightness (0-255 scale). |
| Red dashed line labelled Clip | The clipping threshold at 245. Data piling up to the right of this line is close to saturation. |
See Auto Exposure for how these values are used.
The Recent Activity card is a short, scrolling feed of application messages, always following the newest. It keeps the last 100 messages and leaves out DEBUG messages so that important events stay visible. For the full log with filtering and search, use the Logs tab.
Below the activity feed, a line shows processing performance:
Proc: 0.30s | Mem: 245 MB | Disk: 280.9 GB free
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Proc | Time taken to process the most recent frame. Updated with each frame. |
| Mem | Memory used by PFR Sentinel. Updated every 5 seconds. |
| Disk | Free space on the drive holding the output directory. Updated every 5 seconds. |
The thin bar along the bottom of the window shows technical details of the latest frame:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| DISK | Free space on the drive holding the output directory, refreshed about every 10 seconds. |
| EXP | Exposure time of the latest frame, e.g. "7.91s" or "250ms". |
| GAIN | Camera gain of the latest frame. |
| SENSOR | Camera sensor temperature. |
| LAST CAPTURE | Capture time (HH:MM:SS) of the latest frame. |
| Version | The app version, at the far right. |
EXP, GAIN, and SENSOR show "—" when capture is stopped. With no camera connected, LAST CAPTURE is cleared as well.
The rail on the left lists the app's pages in three groups, with Logs and Settings at the bottom:
| Group | Pages |
|---|---|
| MONITOR | Live Monitoring, Meteor Tracker |
| IMAGE | Capture, Image Processing, Overlays, All-Sky |
| PUBLISH | Output, Timelapse, Library |
| (bottom) | Logs, Settings |
The selected page is highlighted in the accent colour. Click the menu icon at the top of the rail to collapse it to icons only, or expand it again.
Badges on the rail:
- Meteor Tracker: an amber BETA label.
- Timelapse: a dot while a timelapse is recording.
- Settings: a ! badge when an update is available, cleared when you open Settings.
When the rail is collapsed, badges shrink to a small dot on the icon.