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!