Thanks for joining us, we’re thrilled to have you here! This will (hopefully) be a fairly quick guide to help you get started with your services.
Data Access
Our data is stored on our cloud instance at https://nebula.rockchucksummit.com. If you are a subscribed member, You should have received a welcome email asking you to create your account and password. If you wish to join our imaging team, please subscribe https://rockchucksummit.com/observatory.
When you first login to nebula.rockchucksummit.com you may see a dashboard like this:
You can customize what you see on this screen – but the important bits are the menu options at top.
The Files tab is where the observatory subs and master files are, and all of our data that is collected is put into group folders that are structured to be descriptive. These group folders don’t count against your personal storage quota and can be synced or downloaded individually.
Once in the files section, you will see a menu like this:
2600MC OSC Data – Some previous data I’ve had from a remote site that I’m sharing for use. This will mostly be integrated masters vs raw data.
Calibration Data – Raw calibration files such as darks, bias, flats. I will try and make associations with the grouped images for associated flats to make flat management easier.
Documents – These are your personal documents – if you want to save any notes/tasks/files
Photos – Your personal photos. You can upload/share from here. This section is like a personal photo gallery and isn’t meant for raw image data, but rather processed gif/png/tiff/jpg.
RCS User Share – this is a group you have read/write access to in order to share anything you want to share with all users in our imaging group. This can be handy to upload your own data, upload masters you may be working on or share processed images or anything related to astrophotography.
Redcat 51 Widefield – this is the current scope/configuration running and will contain all data being collected in the immediate term. Once we add another scope or facility, it will be another folder. We may have to re-organize the calibration data sets too as we expand.
If you click on the Red Cat 51 Widefield folder, you should see image sets that we have shared and ones that are still being imaged may have (WIP) – Work in progress. Feel free to integrate as you see fit but know we’re still collecting data.
Synchronizing your data
You can synchronize with observing data by installing the appropriate nextcloud synchronization app for your OS at https://nextcloud.com/install
Click on “Nextcloud Download for Desktop” and choose the appropriate OS for your platform.
When you install this tool, it will ask for your account info to authorize and the server’s name. For the server’s name, use https://nebula.rockchucksummit.com
You can configure the sync to be on demand or specific folders or all folders. Please beware that we may image up to 15gb of data per night (especially in those long winter nights). You can be selective downloading over the web or use synchronization to share to your own files, so they download while you sleep.
Sharing your own data
Everyone gets 1gb of storage with their base account to be able to share with the world any images they create or you can use this to save masters/files you are working on.
If users gravitate towards using this storage for keeping an off-site backup of their data, we’ll look at adding additional storage plans. Let us know if this is something that may be of interest to you!
If you want to share data with all users on our platform, you can write to the RCS User Share.
Please do not share anything that isn’t related to astronomy, astrophotography, image editing, processing or associated tools, services and plugins. Please do not post any commercial or copyrighted information online in any of our group shares or public shares.
Join us on Discord
Discord allows is to live-chat and interact with people. Our automation tools also report to channels so you can see what is going on in real-time. Join or connect to discord here: https://discord.gg/DzcnXfyBVQ
Discord is free to use and available for every OS and platform.
More coming soon
Next cloud affords us lots of opportunities to add new services that make sense for our community. We’re experimenting with using the calendar, tasks and notes to keep people up to date and we’re looking at adding services and capabilities to make the service as streamlined as can be.