Notification Center

In its current form, SGPro is great at telling you what’s happening right now. If you watch your sequence like a hawk, this is probably good enough. For most though, you are inclined to leave SGPro unattended for long periods of time. When you come back and things don’t seem right, it’s hard to tell exactly what happened. Was it clouds? Failure to perform a meridian flip? A faulty USB hub? Having a consolidated Notification Center in SGPro can really help paint a concise picture of the evening's mishap. Even if there is no mishap, you can review a list of notifications and determine, quickly, if the sequence is running as you expected. Targets in the wrong order? Changing filters too often? Not running auto focus when you expect?

To open and view current notifications, click on the double arrows next to the speech bubble (located in the upper right corner of SGPro)

The consolidated Notification Center should look and feel a lot like the actual Windows 10 Notification Center. This is, of course, the point. SGPro notifications follow new Windows 10 guidelines for event messaging. I notification pane will open and attach itself to the right-hand side of the main window. The Notification Center, when open will provide the ability to apply two different filters to the list of notifications:

  1. Show or hide “Info” messages. Hiding these can give you quick access to more meaningful events in the sequence. Adding them back in can give you significantly more data around certain parts of the sequence.
  2. Show notifications only from the last hour. Using this filter, you can more easily see things that have happened in the very recent past (especially helpful for errors that might occurred on a different day).




The notification tiles themselves are fairly general: Information, Warnings, Errors and Alerts (anything that requires your attention to continue). That said, we have created a set of special notifications, that, in general, are of greater interest to anyone engaged in reviewing the notifications for a sequence. Specifically, there will be different, easily identified icons for:

  • Image complete (with a button to open that image inside SGPro)
  • Filter change
  • Auto focus (with HFR value)
  • Target change (centering)
  • Meridian flip
  • Mount park
  • Observatory park
  • Any messages having to do with recovery of a sequence (recovery mode)

As you might have deduced, the Notification Center is not super useful when it’s not visible. That said, some of the notifications are important enough to force their way on to the screen (regardless of the state of the notification pain). In these cases, the notification will appear by itself in the lower right corner. It will remain visible for 30 seconds and clicking it will open the notification pane.  For information on setting up remote notifications so you can get messages to your phone or email, see here.