Elite Observatory Core
Tool for reading/monitoring Elite Dangerous journals for interesting objects.
Please note that Observatory Core is a perpetual work-in-progress. New features are being developed and even the current ones may experience a degree of flux.
What Is It?
Observatory Core differs from the original Elite Observatory in that it is a fully generic reader for the Elite Dangerous journal files, passing those events along to plugins to do the actual work.
Observatory will attempt to locate your Elite Dangerous journal location in its default location, though other locations can be specified from the settings in the "Core" application tab by double-clicking the journal path at the bottom.
The "Read All" button will read all journal files in the specified folder, handing their contents over to all loaded worker plugins. "Start Monitor" will begin watching files in the journal folder for changes, and pass new journal lines as they are created, as well as all changes to the status.json file, over to the worker plugins.
In addition to updating the content of their respective UI tabs, some workers can also send notifications, which will be distributed to all notifier plugins, as well as be passed to Observatory Core's native notification popup.
You can find more specific instructions and details of what all the core settings and buttons do in the usage guide.
For specifics on what each plugin does, please refer to their respective wiki pages:
If you're interested in Custom Criteria for Explorer in particular you can find the documentation for using them here.
If you want to chat or collaborate with other users of Observatory you can find us either in the Elite Dangerous forum thread for Observatory (opens in a new tab), or on the Elite Observatory Discord (opens in a new tab).
For information on how to create a plugin, refer to this article about ObservatoryFramework.
Prerequisites for use
Ideally just a copy of Elite Dangerous. The installer should grab necessary prerequisites for you, but if for some reason that fails you can manually install the .NET 8 Desktop runtime.
The portable build has no prerequisites due to bundling the .NET runtime along with the program, though this does make the exe commensurately larger.
Prerequisites for building
C# 9.0, .NET 8.0, and ObservatoryFramework.