Solar Eclipse Workbench 1.8.1 — Live View & safer partial-phase timing

Released 15 April 2026

Solar Eclipse Workbench 1.8.1 focuses on practical, on-site improvements for eclipse photography: a lightweight, non-blocking Live View preview to verify framing and focus, and a safer timing anchor for partial‑phase sequences in the Wizard to avoid conflicts with totality shots.  Solar Eclipse Workbench runs on macOS, Linux and Windows (using WSL).

Highlights

• Live View preview: 1 FPS JPEG thumbnails from your camera for visual verification without interrupting captures.
• Auto‑pause during totality: preview pauses around totality to guarantee shot timing.
• Safer partial‑phase timing: wizard-generated partial sequences are now anchored to C2 to avoid overlaps with totality scripts.

What's new — Live View

The new Live View window opens a floating preview showing a small JPEG thumbnail from the connected camera (via gphoto2 capture_preview). It's designed to be low-overhead and never interfere with scheduled captures.

• Non-blocking preview: frames are fetched at ~1 fps as JPEG thumbnails so transfers are tiny and fast.
• Background thread: preview runs in a background thread (LiveViewThread) that attempts the per-camera USB lock with a 50 ms timeout. When a scheduled shot is firing the preview frame is silently skipped, so shot timing is never affected.
• Full-resolution files unchanged: the camera continues to save full-resolution photos to its card; the preview is only for verification.
• Auto‑pause during totality: preview automatically pauses 15 s before C2 and resumes 15 s after C3. A yellow banner indicates the paused state.
• User control: a Disable / Enable Live View toggle lets you turn the preview off or on at any time without stopping the running script.
• Clean shutdown: closing the main window stops the Live View thread cleanly.
• Hardware requirement: Live View requires a gphoto2‑compatible camera; a warning dialog is shown when no camera is available.

Changed — safer partial‑phase timing

The Wizard’s generated partial-phase shots that previously referenced C1, +, offset are now generated relative to C2 (i.e., C2, -, offset). By anchoring both the partial sequence and the totality sequence to the same contact, timing conflicts are prevented even if partial intervals are not perfectly calibrated.

Upgrade notes

Quick upgrade (PyPI):

pip install --upgrade solareclipseworkbench

More information can be found on the GitHub page.