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Stopping old feeds for OW 4.7 and an update about IOTA and Personal events

 

Hi All,

As you all know with the release of OW 5.0 most predictions started coming from OWC. Some of the feeds however continued to post the predictions the old way as well so users with OW 4.7 who were slow to migrate could still get them. Initial announcement was that this double posting would continue for about 2 months.

After almost 6 months now the old way of posting predictions will finally cease and users with OW 4.7 (if anyone) will have to migrate to 5.0 to continue receiving events. May be some of the feed maintainers have stopped the double-posting already but this is just a reminder for everyone that OW 4.7 will be no longer supported.

There is also a work on the way to bring Personals predictions (posted the same way as before) to OWC and I hope to release the OW Desktop update for this soon. The advantage is that those personal predictions will get the standard OWC treatment including prediction updates when orbit is updated and an OWC page for the events.

You may have also noticed that OWC now also shows IOTA Occultation predictions, while OW still gets the events from Steve Preston's web site. This has been done as a transitional phase before fully moving IOTA events to OWC, which is still probably a few months away.

Some of the detalis of the IOTA events move to OWC are still to be decicded but Steve Preston will stop posting the data he does at the moment at , including Guide star charts, Occult's plots, pre-points lists and others. It is liekly that the site will get the events from OWC and still show them but with smaller amount of detail and links back to OWC which will be the central resource of information about the IOTA events.

If anyone has concerns about the above and about only relying on the information in OW and OWC for their planning, now is a good time to speak up so we can try to identify and address any potential final gaps and issues.


Regards,
Hristo Pavlov.



On Sunday, May 23, 2021, 04:02:08 PM GMT+10, Hristo Pavlov <hristo_dpavlov@...> wrote:


Hi All,

Today I have released the new version of Occult Watcher which is a major update in regards to how feed events make it into OW and how they are managed by the Feed Maintainers. There is no change to the UI and user experience of how these events are managed by the observers in OW.

One difference is that the online link to the events (new or updated) will point to a web page on the OccultWatcher Cloud system -

Within the next few months I expect to start making small updates to OW user experience to take better advantage of the new OWC event tagging system, with something likely coming up next week - stay tuned!

At the moment Feed Maintainers are (and have been for the past 2 months) keeping up to date two different locations of their feed events. One for the current (now old) version of OW 4.7 and the other one of the new version 5.0.

There is a plan that they will stop posting events to the old location in about 2 months from now which gives you 2 months to upgrade to OW 5.0. If you haven't updated to OW 5.0 by then, you will not be receiving any new events in OW 4.7 once they stop posting events the old way. OW 5.0 events are also automatically updated by OWC and will be more recent than OW 4,7 events. All these are great reasons to upgrade to v5.0 very soon.


After you have updated OccultWatcher please do the following:

- Stop OW and then restart it. This is a workaround for an issue where wrong feed settings would have been loaded if you are logged in to windows with a non-admin account and you had to type admin password to complete the upgrade process. I will release a fix for this issue in the near future but for now a manual shut down and a restart of OW with your usual Windows account is required.

- Make sure to press the Synchronise button to get the latest events from OWC. Because OWC automatically monitors for orbit updates and updates predictions, doing this will get you the latest predictions for recently updated orbits. If you are subscribed to the CometOcc feed this will make a huge difference as the OWC comet predictions will be using Horizon's orbits, while OW 4.7 Comet events will be using the less accurate MPC orbits.

You will also notice that (apart from IOTA Occultations, which is still using the old style of fetching) all new feeds will synchronise much faster than before. This is only one of the improvements of moving the feeds to OWC.

OW 5.0 has been beta tested for about 2 months but it is likely that small issues have been missed. If you see anything which doesn't seem right, please report it directly to me or to the OccultWatcher group.io group. Things to watch for are predictions that don't seem updated as well as wrong data being shown for a prediction in OW or the OWC link when you follow the web page for the event.


I would like to thank all Feed Maintainers and all people who dedicated time to contribute to the OWC project and to help reaching this significant milestone!


Best Regards,
Hristo Pavlov

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