Getting Started

This walks you from a fresh install to a rehearsed, eclipse-ready capture plan. Budget an evening for the first pass — and do it weeks before your eclipse, with the same Mac, camera, cables, and telescope you'll use in the field.

Install & first launch
Connect your camera
Benchmark the camera
Focus
Set your observing site
Build the capture plan
Rehearse — the most important step
Eclipse day

1. Install & first launch

Download the DMG from the home page, drag Photality to Applications, open it.
Photality asks for no system permissions — no location, no notifications, nothing to approve. The only network access is checking for updates.
Frames save to ~/Pictures/Photality by default; change it in Settings → Output Directory (an SSD with plenty of free space — full-sensor eclipse runs are tens of gigabytes).

2. Connect your camera

Plug in your ZWO ASI or Player One camera and click Connect on the Cameras tab. Gain, exposure, ROI, binning, and cooling (on cooled models) are all on this tab, next to a live preview.
No hardware yet? The built-in Virtual Camera simulates a filtered sun — every tutorial step below works with it.
Settings are remembered per camera (keyed by its serial number), so a two-camera setup keeps two independent configurations.

Check your cable. If you see an orange "USB 2.0 link — check cable" badge under the camera's name, the cable negotiated USB 2 instead of USB 3 — common with charge-only USB-C cables — and preview and capture rates will be severely limited. Swap the cable before doing anything else, and test your spare cable too.

3. Benchmark the camera

Tools → Camera Benchmark… runs a ~60-second sweep that measures how fast your camera actually reads out frames at each resolution and image mode. Photality uses the result to predict per-frame timing in the plan editor and warn you when a sequence asks for more than the camera can deliver. Run it once per camera (on the good cable!) — the result is saved with the camera's profile.

4. Focus

Open the Focus Assistant with ⇧⌘F (Tools menu). Start the preview first — the assistant scores sharpness from live frames (higher = sharper), with a rolling chart so you can watch focus improve as you work. Point at the filtered sun (sunspots and the limb are great focus targets) and adjust focus while watching the score climb; the bar shows how close you are to the sharpest the session has seen.

Using an electronic focuser (Astroasis Rose) — motor control, autofocus & the Focus Point

Motor control

With an Astroasis Rose electronic focuser connected, the panel adds motor controls: nudge with ←/→ (hold ⌥ for a 10× jump), go straight to a position, and see your place in the focuser's full travel.

Autofocus New in 0.94

With the focuser connected, click Autofocus. Photality walks the focuser in coarse steps until it brackets the peak, then maps the focus curve with a fine scan and drives to the fitted best point — watch it happen live on the chart.
Seeing (atmospheric shimmer) makes scores noisy; the Settle time is how long each probe averages before judging. If results vary run to run, raise it.

The Focus Point — your totality insurance

Once focus is perfect, click Save on the Focus Point row. That position is stored with the camera's profile.
Return drives back to it instantly — and it works during a capture run, because the focuser is independent of the camera. If something looks soft mid-totality, don't search: click Return.

Focus training through partiality New in 0.94 · Experimental

As the air cools toward totality, focus drifts — and the partial phase is mostly waiting. Settings → Experimental → Train focus through partiality uses that dead time: if Partial 1 captures at intervals of 2+ minutes, Photality inserts short focus touch-ups between them. Each one is a small scan around the current focus with a hard deadline — it yields to the plan, never delays a capture — and each success updates the saved Focus Point, so your totality insurance stays current all the way to C2. The tune events appear right in the timeline, and the run log records the drift they tracked.

5. Set your observing site

On the Eclipse Location tab, enter your site's coordinates and elevation — read them from your phone's GPS at the site. Photality deliberately doesn't use Mac location services: at a remote site, Wi-Fi positioning fails or silently lies by kilometers, and a wrong position means wrong contact times.
Photality computes your C1–C4 contact times to the second, with an optional lunar-limb profile for beads-level precision.
Sync your Mac's clock before the eclipse (Date & Time → set automatically, while you still have internet). Timing is only as good as the clock.

6. Build the capture plan

The Timeline tab holds one sequence per phase: Partial 1 (C1→C2), Baily's Beads at C2, Totality, Beads at C3, and Partial 2 (C3→C4).
Partials are typically sparse interval captures (a frame every few minutes); beads are fast bursts, optionally with a tight ROI for speed; totality is where you spend your exposure budget — a repeating bracket from prominences (short) to earthshine (long).
The editor predicts per-frame timing from your benchmark and warns when a sequence won't fit its window. Trust the warnings — they're computed from your camera's measured behavior.
Plans can be exported and imported as files (File menu) — including the contact times — so you can prepare on one machine and carry the plan to another.

7. Rehearse — the most important step

Rehearsal runs your entire plan against simulated eclipse time — real camera, real frames, real disk writes, real audio alerts. It is the single best predictor of eclipse-day success.
Run at least one full rehearsal with your complete field setup: same Mac, camera, cables, focuser, and a battery if that's how you'll power things.
Check afterwards: frames on disk for every phase, the run log (capture_log.txt in the session folder), and that the spoken countdowns and solar-filter reminders played when you expected.
Then rehearse the failure you fear: yank the camera's USB cable mid-run and watch Photality reconnect and resume. Better to see it once at home than wonder at totality.

Disk math: Photality pre-checks free space when you start a plan and warns live if it runs low mid-capture — but the time to discover your SSD is too small is at rehearsal, not at C1.

8. Eclipse day

Set up early. Confirm your site coordinates against your phone's GPS one more time.
Connect everything, start the preview, and dial in focus once the optics have settled to ambient temperature (with an electronic focuser: Autofocus + Save the Focus Point).
Start the plan before C1 and step away from the keyboard. Photality speaks the countdowns — including the remove/replace solar filter calls around C2 and C3.
If a cable gets kicked, Photality reconnects and carries on. If focus looks soft, one click on Return. Otherwise: watch the eclipse. That's the whole point.

Questions, or something didn't behave? See Support — and if Photality helped you capture totality, there's an entirely optional tip jar.