Welcome to the very first post on the Observatory blog!

Observatory is an image management application specifically designed for astronomy. Every night, thousands of telescopes around the world are used to obtain deep images of the night sky. All those images need to be calibrated, stacked and processed; they are analyzed and shared, and they are stored. Over the years I have taken thousands upon thousands of images myself this way, all organized in a consistent folder/file structure. But what bothered me is that it became more and more difficult over time to find images in this structure. Sometimes I wished I had tagged them, sometimes I wished I could find all images that were taken of a specific area of the sky, and sometimes I even wished I had organized them in a completely different way.

That’s how the idea for Observatory was born. With Observatory you can finally organize your astronomical images in any way you want. It will even tag many of them automatically based on the image content. And it works all nondestructively. Your original images and folder structure will not be changed.

Observatory is not just an image organizer though. It will also give you direct access to the millions of research images of professional observatories around the world for example. And since Observatory is not limited to a single image library, you can create one for each of your research projects. You can read about that and many more features on the website.

What makes it even better is that, after a long period of testing, Observatory is now available on the Mac App Store. Go get it today!

What’s more is that 1.0.1 is already in the works. It will contain some exciting additions, but I’ll not spill the beans about those yet.