What’s New in 4.7

TPE Web 4.7 adds support for adding your saved Shot Plans to your calendar.

You can now add individual plans, export an entire shooting schedule, attach reminders to plans or create a calendar event directly from the view you are currently planning.

The release also includes some useful Shot Plan workflow improvements, plus a collection of refinements to eclipse planning, historical dates and 3D reliability.

Add Shot Plans to your calendar

Saved Shot Plans now include an Add to Calendar option.

You can choose from:

• Calendar file (.ics), for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook and other calendar applications
• Google Calendar
• Outlook.com

Calendar events include the planned date and time, location, planning notes and reference links, together with useful context such as the nearest light event.

They also include an Open in TPE link that takes you directly back to the saved plan on the page where you created it.

Times are exported as exact instants, so a plan displays correctly even if you open the calendar while you’re in a different time zone from the planned location.

There is no subscription requirement for Add to Calendar.

Add reminders to your Shot Plans

Each Shot Plan can now include up to 10 reminders.

Edit the plan and then choose from preset intervals, ranging from one week to 15 minutes before the planned time, or enter a custom interval:

Reminders are saved and synchronised with the Shot Plan.

When you export using a Calendar file (.ics), those reminders become alerts on the calendar event. If you have not configured any reminders, TPE includes a default alert one hour before the planned time.

Google Calendar and Outlook.com links cannot transfer reminder settings directly, so use the .ics option when alerts are important.

Export your upcoming shooting schedule

You can also export multiple Shot Plans into a single calendar file.

Calendar export is available from:

• Shot Plans
• Upcoming
• All Items
• Any list containing Shot Plans

The Upcoming view on the left-hand sidebar of the Library page is particularly useful for this. Export it and you effectively have your upcoming TPE shooting schedule ready to add to your calendar.

Only plans with a date and time are included.

Add the current view without saving a plan

Not everything needs to become a permanent Shot Plan.

The Share dialogue on the Map, 3D, Moon and Eclipse pages now includes an Add to Calendar option.

This creates an event from the date, time and location you are currently viewing, making it useful for a one-off idea or observation you want to put on your calendar without first saving it to your Library.

Faster access to Shot Plan actions

Shot Plan tabs now have a context menu.

Right-click a plan tab to access common actions including:

• Edit
• Save or discard changes
• View in Library
• Add to Calendar
• Close

If a plan contains unsaved changes, the calendar action makes it clear that the saved version is what will be exported.

We’ve also made the empty plan strip easier to understand. When no plan is open, the + button is now labelled New plan instead of appearing as an unexplained icon.

Eclipse planning refinements

4.7 includes several improvements for photographers planning solar eclipses.

Eclipse paths now shows additional significant locations, including the point of maximum Moon/Sun diameter ratio and important transition points during hybrid eclipses, for example November 14, 2031.

The centre line can also take the Moon’s real limb profile into account. In unusual cases, mountains and valleys along the lunar limb can produce short stretches of persistent Baily’s beads or a broken annular ring, and TPE can now show those regimes directly on the eclipse path.

Eclipse marker popups now include local time as well as UTC, and the Eclipse Simulator mini-map follows the selected location correctly when the pin moves.

We’ve also fixed several specialist issues involving eclipses near UTC midnight, observer height over the ocean, very short totalities and Moon illumination during totality.

Better handling of historical dates

A couple of fixes improve planning far into the past.

Typed dates from eras before standardised civil time are now handled more reliably, including locations where historical local time offsets included seconds rather than whole minutes.

TPE links also now preserve historical date and time values without accumulating small timing errors each time a link is reopened or shared.

Other fixes

TPE Web 4.7 also includes a number of general reliability improvements:

• Fixed an occasional crash while initialising Photorealistic mode in the 3D view.
• Malformed date parameters in manually edited or damaged links can no longer prevent the app from starting.
• Unresolved time anchors are now much more obvious, with a warning indicator and struck-through label.
• Help category names containing special characters now display correctly.

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The headline feature in 4.7 is Add to Calendar. Saved Shot Plans can now move naturally from planning into scheduling, complete with reminders and a link straight back to the original plan in TPE.