SkyTools 4 Imaging startup dates

[dibia]

SkyTools 4 imaging does not start with the current date, but some date that I had previously used.  Planning could be a week off before I catch that.  Is there any way to make it start with the current date as default?  ST3 always started with the current date.

[theskyhound]

If you upgraded from SkyTools 3, you might expect the Target Selection tool to be for planning, like the Nightly Planner, but planning for a specific night is much better left for the Scheduling tools in ST4. The Target Selection tool is designed for selecting target objects that are suitable for your imaging system. This is often completely independent of any date. Sometimes this does include a specific night, like say for a comet, which is why there is a date to select. But if used as intended, I can't think of many use cases where you would use it daily. Therefore, it was never meant to select a new date every time you started it. After all, if you were selecting comets to image for the next new moon, and restarted, would you really want it to set the date back to today? What it if did that and you didn't notice? It could screw everything up.

There was a bug where ST4 Imaging was picking up the today's date preferences setting from SkyTools 4 Visual, and applying to ST4 Imaging, which I fixed in an update. If you had the bundle, and had ST4 Visual set to always use today's date, then ST4 Imaging would too. But I never intended it to do that, for the reasons outlined above. I will eventually add this as a separate preference to SkyTools 4 Imaging, but only grudgingly.

Maybe you have a special use case, and that's Ok. But after talking to a few others, this is sort of a red flag question. The Target Selection tool was not meant to be used for your nightly planning. If you use SkyTools Imaging in a way it wasn't meant to be used, you will end up unhappy, because it isn't really designed for how you are using it, and will never work to your satisfaction. ST4 works as a system: select a target, create an imaging project, schedule the project (using the Scheduler or Real Time tools). If you are not using this process, you are missing out on most of what SkyTools Imaging has to offer.

[Vietti-Teppa]

Hello, that's a shame, the sky is capricious here, so we plan for the same day only and this function would be very useful to us...

[Vietti-Teppa]

Hello, that's a shame, the sky is capricious here, so we plan for the same day only and this function would be very useful to us...