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Announcing SolFITS, a new macOS application that plate solves whole folders of FITS images.

Your capture program knows roughly where the telescope was pointing, but not exactly where the camera was looking. Other software, such as programs that mark the objects in an image or build a mosaic by coordinates, needs a plate solved image. SolFITS works out the position, scale, rotation and field size of every image in a folder, and optionally its subfolders, on your Mac. Then you decide which solutions to save, and where.

SolFITS, FITSit and Observatory cover important steps from the telescope to a finished picture, but each works entirely on its own. Tidy a folder with FITSit, solve it with SolFITS, then import it into Observatory, which recognizes the solutions saved in the FITS header or as an extended attribute and uses them to show the objects in each image.

SolFITS is available now on the Mac App Store, with a 14-day free trial.

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Plate Solve Images

Choose a folder, or drop one on the window, and the table fills in as the results arrive.

• The star catalog is built into the app, so solving needs no internet connection
• Images help each other: one solved image gives a starting point for the others of the same sky
• Images with no position in their headers are solved from an earlier solution or from the target named in OBJECT or in the file name
• Calibration frames are recognized and skipped, and solutions an image already has are used
• As a last resort, images can be sent to astrometry.net with your own API key; only the positions of the stars are sent, never the image

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Check the Results

Every file is a row with its target, position, pixel scale, rotation and field size. Sort by any column, search by name, or show only the files with unsaved solutions, new solutions or a suggested target. Select a file to see its picture with an automatic screen stretch, and zoom from 1% to 1000% to compare the same area in different images. Files you don’t need can be moved to another folder or to the Trash.

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Keep the Answer with Your Files

Tick the images whose solutions you want to keep and choose where they go: the FITS header (only the WCS keywords are written), a .wcs file next to the image, or an extended attribute that leaves the file untouched. A solution that turns out to be wrong can be deleted again.

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Name Your Targets

The OBJECT of a header is often missing, mistyped or written in some other way. Because SolFITS knows where each solved image points, it can suggest the name its catalogs use, and writes it to the OBJECT card when you confirm. Nothing else in the header changes.

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Details

• Supports .fits, .fit and .fts files of any bit depth, including raw color (Bayer) frames
• Solving only reads your files; only the files you have ticked are changed, and only when you confirm
• Includes a built-in Help book

Requirements: macOS 26.5+, Apple silicon and Intel. Price: USD 9.99, with a 14-day free trial.

Announcing FITSit, a new macOS application for reviewing and organizing folders of FITS images.

A night of imaging leaves hundreds of FITS files that need attention before calibration and stacking: bad frames to remove, meaningless file names to fix, and header keywords (OBJECT, FILTER, EXPTIME, DATE-OBS) that are missing or wrong. FITSit brings these tasks together in one native Mac application that works on entire folders at a time, optionally including the folders inside them.

FITSit and Observatory, our image management application for astrophotographers, complement each other but are entirely independent: neither needs the other. Use FITSit to review, clean up and prepare the frames in a folder, and Observatory to organize and catalog your images. Observatory’s integration reports and session history also help you plan your imaging sessions.

Your data is handled conservatively. Headers are written only when you choose Save, files are renamed only when you choose Rename, and removed frames go to the Trash.

FITSit is available now on the Mac App Store.

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Blink Images

Step or play through a folder as a blink comparator to reveal clouds, satellite trails, asteroids and drift.

• Playback from 1/10 to 20 images per second
• Images are prepared in the background for instant stepping; folders larger than available memory are supported
• Zoom and position persist between frames, so a region of interest can be watched across the whole set
• Automatic screen stretch (PixInsight-style Auto STF); raw Bayer frames are displayed in color
• Tick rejected frames while reviewing, then move them to another folder or to the Trash

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Inspect Images

Measures every frame in a folder and presents the results in a sortable table: minimum, maximum, median, MAD, star count, overexposed stars, and the median HFD, FWHM and eccentricity of the stars.

• Star metrics come from an elliptical Moffat fit to a sample of up to 1000 stars per image; HFD is measured directly from the pixels
• Results are reproducible: the same image always yields the same numbers
• Bayer frames are measured on their green pixels only, without debayering

Tick by Range provides a slider for each measurement. Set the acceptable range for each, and every frame outside them is ticked, ready to be moved or trashed in one step.

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Rename Files

Name files from a template built from their own header keywords:

{DATE-OBS:YYYYMMDD}.{OBJECT}.{FILTER}.{EXPTIME:.0}s_{Counter:04}
						

• Number and date formatting, fallback keywords ({DATE-OBS|DATEOBS1}), original file name and counter
• A New Name column previews the result for every file before anything is renamed
• Missing keywords and name conflicts are reported and skipped; existing files are never overwritten
• Templates can be saved and reused

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Edit Headers

Read, search, add, edit, delete and reorder header cards, with full Undo and Redo. Changes are collected and written only on Save.

With several files selected, a combined view lists one row per keyword and applies any change to every selected file, which makes correcting OBJECT, FILTER or a missing keyword across a whole night a matter of seconds.

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Details

• Supports .fits, .fit and .fts files of any bit depth
• Zoom from 1% to 1000% using drag, mouse wheel, trackpad pinch or the View menu
• Includes a built-in Help book

Requirements: macOS 26.5+. Price: USD 9.99, with a 14-day free trial.

Observatory 2.2.1 is out on the Mac App Store, with a handful of improvements that fell out of the work on 2.2.

Observatory automatically determines which image has been processed, necessary for the Statistics persona, but now you can override this yourself with the new “MasterLight” image type. New is also the subframes attribute, for tracking the number of subframes used for a processed image. It is not information that is typically available in images, but if your image filenames include NxMs, where M matches the exposure time in seconds (e.g. 20260909.M31.Light.L.25x60s-10C3008x3008_55g125_BIN1.xisf), then Observatory will populate it and adjust the exposure time accordingly.

Timestamps throughout the application, in the browser, the inspectors and Quick Look, are now shown in your local time instead of UTC. Searching “All” also got smarter: it now matches targets and tags that merely contain your search text rather than requiring an exact match, and both are sorted better in the navigator. For FITS files that are missing the OBJECT (target) keyword, Observatory guesses it if the image contains RA and Dec coordinates.

One fix worth calling out: file type registration for Observatory’s document types is now more robust and harder for other apps to hijack.

There’s more in this release, like navigator keyboard shortcuts, focuser temperature in the Overview inspector, reordered Personas, a fix for the inspector resizing regression on macOS Tahoe, and more. The full list is in the release notes.

Today we released a large update to Observatory with exciting new features. In addition to organizing your images with albums and smart albums using the library navigator, and automatic tags in the tag navigator, they are now also automatically organized by session, target, and equipment.

Although I organize my images by session in the file system, you don’t have to. Observatory doesn’t care how you organize your images in your file system at all. Just drop your imaging folder on Observatory, and it will create a new library, without copying or modifying any of your folders or files, and you can still navigate the images by session, target, and equipment in Observatory.

Observatory always had powerful search tools, and it is great to see plate solved images with it and identify the many objects within, but for planning imaging sessions you need to know how many frames you already shot with what filter for a target. That’s why we added the Integration Reports two years ago, which allow you to see exactly that.

But we could do better than that, and expand this to any selection in the library navigator, or the new session navigator. Hence we are introducing the all new Statistics Persona:

It summarizes the number of sessions, targets and exposure times for the original, unprocessed light frames in your library. It presents this in a session history graph, but also shows your top ten filters, targets, equipment and even constellations ordered by total exposure time. This is done for the whole library if you select “All Images” in the library navigator, but it can also be limited to just one album, or a smart album. And with the new navigators, you can limit the view to a single session, one whole year of observations, or by specific equipment.

If you limit the view to a selected target in the target navigator, you’ll also see all the sessions for that target and exposure details by filter. This is what the old Integration Report did too, so we removed that toolbar button with this update.

In addition to these new features, we have also added many new image attributes. For example the illuminated fraction of the moon when the image was acquired, or the target’s angular separation from the moon, focuser temperature & position, focal ratio, and many more.

There were many more changes, which are described in the release notes. A few things that originally were targeted for this release will be addressed in future updates.

Existing libraries will automatically be upgraded with this release, but to see all new features, you’ll have to create a new library.

Enjoy!

Observatory 2.1.5, now available on the Mac App Store, resolves an issue where the album hierarchy was not always correctly created for watched folders that had this feature enabled. With this update Observatory also stops bugging you for App Store ratings. If you want to leave a review please do so, but it will not remind you anymore.

I recently picked up where I left off for 2.2. That release has some long overdue new features, and a complete rework of an existing one. It‘s way more exciting than 2.1.5, but then this is just a maintenance update.

Release notes.