Astro Tools

A small collection of tools I have built for astronomical photography and observation planning. More to come.

Capture Eclipse Visualizer (2026) - An interactive timeline view of CaptureEclipse XML scripts. Upload your own script, pick an observation site (or fetch precise contact times from the USNO API), and see every photo plotted on a totality timeline with exposure-duration-scaled widths.

This is just a way to visualize scripts generated with Robert J. Hawley’s Capture Eclipse software, to help optimize script editing. Credit goes back to Robert and Fred Espenak who have done the hard work implementing into software fairly complex solar eclipse timing calculations.

As the xml files do not have absolute coordinates or timings, these need to be entered manually. The Visualizer pulls timings by querying the USNO database (after you input site coordinates), however these timings may differ from Robert’s calculations. The differences are typically sub-second to a few seconds, due to factors like ΔT (Earth rotation correction) values, ephemeris vintages, and lunar limb profile corrections. USNO does not apply limb profile corrections; CaptureEclipse may use slightly different reference data.