Understanding an object
Planning tells you what to observe. This chapter is the other half: what you are looking at. NightScribe has one door for every object it knows, and the card behind it is the same wherever you open it from.
Three ways to open it
the box in the top bar: Explore an object… (type a name and press Enter);
Tools → Explore object…;
double-click any row of the Tonight list, or the button on the row.
The name is looked up in VSX, SIMBAD, JPL SBDB, Horizons, CAD, TNS and the NASA Exoplanet Archive, so it works for an asteroid, a comet, a supernova, a variable star or an exoplanet host. If the object is in no catalogue, the Tonight view still lets you create it by hand.
The card
The card is a calling card, not a data dump:
a hook line and a few outreach bullets, in Spanish and English: the sentence you would say out loud to explain why this object is interesting;
a parameter table where every row is explained: the orbital family, the MOID (the minimum distance the orbit ever gets to the Earth's, in lunar distances), the size estimated from the absolute magnitude, the next close approach, the discovery date. It is multiline and nothing is truncated;
the charts: the orbit (animated by date, with hover readouts), the night sky with your horizon silhouette and the safe window shaded, the survey field and the light curve when there is one. In the app they are live vector graphics (zoom, pan, hover); the same engines render the PNGs;
the capture chips: current magnitude, apparent rate, the maximum trail-free exposure with your camera, the window and the hours above the horizon, plus copyable coordinates in decimal and sexagesimal with their epoch.
Why does every row come explained? Because "MOID 0.03 AU" means nothing to most people, and "it can come within twelve lunar distances" means everything. The figures are the same; only the reader changes. The explanations live in one place (core/explain.py), so a type, a spectral class or a discovery method is described the same way wherever it appears.From the card to a project
The card is a starting point, not a dead end: Create project turns the object into a project and drops you on its card, with the coordinates, window and magnitude already filled in (chapter 03). From there the flow is the usual one: capture, analyse, publish.