Check the Mac App Store, because we’ve just released a major performance boost to Observatory.

This is the first in a series of performance focused updates that we’ll release this year, and its effects are immediately noticeable.

For example, a Late 2013 15” MacBook Pro in our test lab now stacks twenty 20-megapixel grayscale images in less than 3 seconds, while dark and flat calibration of all these images only takes 4 seconds. What’s more is that on this computer, the normalize adjustment is now 6 times faster, and the align adjustment is even 15 times faster than before.

Observatory 1.0.6 is also smarter about when to purge an image from memory. The image browser got faster and its selection issues were fixed. We resolved several calibration bugs, and we fixed a few crashes.

For the full set of release notes, head here.

Enjoy!