Visplot

Visibility plot and observation scheduling tool for telescopes. It allows automatic, nearly-optimal scheduling of an entire observing night.

Using Visplot

The latest version of Visplot is hosted publicly at https://www.visplot.com. You can use it without installing anything on your computer.

Local installation

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine (e.g., for development and testing purposes).

Prerequisites

• a web server (e.g., Apache) that can run PHP scripts (i.e., mod_php enabled);
• a modern browser with HTML5 support (Visplot may load but not display correctly on older browsers, or it may fail to load at all);

Installation on Ubuntu 22.04

• Make sure your installation is up-to-date:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

• Install Apache and PHP:

  sudo apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php

• Enable Apache and PHP (adapt the PHP version number if necessary):

  sudo systemctl enable apache2
  sudo a2enmod php8.1

• Restart the Apache server:

  sudo systemctl restart apache2

Test that the installation has been successful by navigating to http://localhost/.

If so, you can just copy the Visplot files to /var/www/html/{SUBDIR} and access them via a browser at http://localhost/{SUBDIR}. If Visplot is the only page that will run on your server, {SUBDIR} can and should be empty.

License

Visplot is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPL3) license. See LICENSE.md for the full text of the license.