NightScribe 0.1.0

The first public release. NightScribe follows an observatory project through its
whole life: plan the night, understand the object, capture and reduce, and
tell it. It is a beta: expect rough edges.

Added

Plan the night

• A ranked, explained list of what is worth observing tonight from your site and
  with your equipment, across eight kinds of targets: NEOs (confirmed and NEOCP
  candidates), comets, comet candidates (PCCP), supernovae, exoplanet transits,
  close approaches, HADS stars, and variable stars and duties.
• A 0–100 score with its "why tonight" sentence, the local horizon and the
  limiting magnitude, the Moon's interference, the session's feasibility and the
  cost in telescope minutes.
• The Sun and the Moon, a 60-day sky calendar computed offline, and Jupiter's
  moon events (transits and shadows) for your site.

Understand every object

• An object card that turns orbital and physical parameters into plain language,
  with orbit, sky, survey-field and light-curve charts and capture chips
  (magnitude, rate, longest trail-free exposure, window, copyable coordinates).

Capture

• It drives CCDciel (complete) or NINA/PINS (in test) and points the telescope:
  send the plan, start and stop the run, and watch it with the last frame
  previewed in the window.
• Export the ephemeris (MPC elements or orbit report) and the capture sequence.

Reduce, in the unified FITS editor

• Calibration: an indexed library of masters by camera, gain, temperature,
  exposure and filter, with a declarative recipe and normalised flats.
• Track & stack: solve, register and combine, with a per-frame position, a
  dithering warning, the centred sequence (GIF or montage) and a manual mode for
  a weak object.
• Photometry: single measurements with guards, comparison sequences with the
  finder-chart picker, series with an ensemble veto and quality gates, the
  period search (Lomb-Scargle, PDM, FAP by bootstrap) and the transit fit with
  the EXOTIC handoff.
• Astrometry: sub-pixel centroids, per-frame and stack combination, the MPC
  report (ADES XML/PSV and 80 columns), the submission, the check against other
  stations with Find_Orb and the ExoClock export.
• Freeing space: archive a visit's originals inside the project and bring them
  back, never overwriting a recaptured frame.

Projects, visits and campaigns

• Every target becomes a project with its own folder and a Card, Capture,
  Analysis, Publishing flow; each night is a visit; campaigns and variable-star
  vigils carry their own cadence.
• The observation journal, the "needs your attention" dashboard and the daily
  check of the vigils against ZTF and the AAVSO community photometry.

Tell it

• Bilingual (ES/EN) post and tweet drafts with the night's charts, from the real
  session data, with an optional AI pass.

Interface and languages

• Three tabs (Tonight, Projects, Campaigns), the unified FITS editor, the
  Spanish and English interface and the offline user guide.

Command line

• Plan and publish from the terminal: tonight, explore, post, solar,
  blink, history, sequence, inject, project and gui.

Optional assistant

• Off by default: it answers from the app's own guide and ADRs, offline, through
  a model you configure.

Distribution

• Windows installer (per-user, no admin rights) and portable zip, a .deb for
  Debian 13+ and Ubuntu 25.10+, a .rpm for Fedora 42+ and openSUSE Tumbleweed
  and a PKGBUILD for Arch. Find_Orb travels inside them and the docs travel with
  the app.
• An OpenCL GPU path for the registration and the combine, on by default, that
  falls back to the processor.

Notes

• This is the first public release, so it is a beta: expect rough edges.
  Report them at https://github.com/irydeo/nightscribe/issues, attaching the
  log (Help → Open the log).
• Find_Orb travels inside the Windows installer and the Linux packages; EXOTIC
  (the transit reduction) is the one external tool you install by hand.
• The NINA/PINS integration is not finished: it is there to be tried and
  to report what is missing or broken, and the rest is planned for 0.2.
  CCDciel is the complete one today (chapter 05 lists what NINA/PINS does not do
  yet).
• The Windows binaries are unsigned: Smart App Control blocks them outright
  and SmartScreen warns until reputation builds, so the installer may need an
  explicit Run anyway or a machine with Smart App Control off. The details are
  in docs/user/01-getting-started.

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Downloads

• NightScribeSetup-0.1.0.exe: Windows installer (per-user, no admin rights needed).
• NightScribe-0.1.0-windows-x64.zip: Windows portable build; unzip and run nightscribe.exe gui.
• nightscribe_0.1.0_amd64.deb: Debian 13+ / Ubuntu 25.10+ (system Python; includes Find_Orb).
• nightscribe-*.x86_64.rpm: Fedora 42+ / openSUSE Tumbleweed (system Python; includes Find_Orb).

Windows can stop the installer in two different ways, and only one has a way through. SmartScreen shows Windows protected your PC and offers More info -> Run anyway. Smart App Control (Windows 11, on by default on new installations) blocks unsigned code outright, with no such option: either turn it off under Windows Security > App & browser control > Smart App Control, or run NightScribe on another machine. The binaries are unsigned because NightScribe is free software and has no code signing certificate; the details are in docs/user/01-getting-started. Other distros (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, ...) install manually: see docs/ASTROMETRY.

On Linux, installing the .deb from your Downloads folder can print an apt note about the sandbox user (permission denied, read as root instead): it is harmless and the install finishes.

The NINA/PINS integration is in test: it is there to be tried and to report what is missing, and the rest is planned for 0.2. CCDciel is the complete observatory backend today.

Report issues at https://github.com/irydeo/nightscribe/issues