Observatory 2 is a major upgrade of Observatory. Its user interface has been completely overhauled, making it more powerful and easier to use. Image overlay and display settings have been enhanced, image calibration has been streamlined, advanced searches can now be performed without creating a Smart Album, and the new Plate Solver automatically adjusts itself to your imaging setup. The orientation of images has changed, to match other software, and internally it now uses Metal Compute instead of OpenCL. USNO-A2.0 and UCAC4 catalog support has been replaced by an internal Gaia catalog up to magnitude 16.

But that’s not all. Observatory 2 is capable of way much more than this:

• Select objects in your plate solved images to see additional information with the new Object inspector;
• Display minor planets, dwarf planets and planets in your images;
• New Watched Folder features to automatically keep your libraries in sync with the file system;
• An enhanced Quick Look extension with image metadata and scale, orientation & grid overlays;
• Select a tag in the new Tag Navigator to display all matching images and highlight the selected object;
• Dual-monitor support;
• Magnitude limits for overlays and automatic tagging;
• Image summary information with the new Overview inspector;
• Blink images and export as a movie;
• Drag the STF, overlay and activity popovers off the toolbar and float as separate panels;
• Faster importing and stacking using the GPU and all CPU performance cores;
• Magnifier inspector;
• Zwicky Transient Facility and Observatory library search in Virtual Observatory;
• Delete Rejected Masters command;
• Image Object attribute, HFD and Median fields;
• Preview images with spacebar;
• New Pick stack type for grouping images;
• Stack type and STF type defaults;
• Quickly toggle all overlays, show objects beyond image boundaries, and adjust overlay contrast;
• Optionally combine images in one library when opening individually from Finder;
• Stacks are now cached instead of being generated every time you select a stack;
• Plate solve or apply adjustments to a stack without creating a Managed Master.

If you are new to Observatory and 2.x is your first purchase, then all these features are included already. But if you are upgrading from Observatory 1.x, then these new features require the “Upgrade from Observatory 1” In-App purchase.

In addition, with an optional In-App purchase the internal Gaia catalog can be expanded all the way to magnitude 20. That’s more than 800 million stars in total!