News

Observatory 2.1.5

2026-04-19T22:00:00.000Z

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.

Observatory 2.1.4

2026-02-17T02:00:00.000Z

Observatory 2.1.4 has been released to the Mac App Store.

Release notes.

Observatory 2.1.3

2025-09-17T04:00:00.000Z

Observatory 2.1.3 has been released to the Mac App Store.

Release notes.

Observatory 2.1.2

2025-04-07T04:50:00.000Z

Observatory 2.1.2 has been released today. Its documentation and release notes once again are searchable from the Help menu.

Release notes.

Observatory 2.1.1

2024-11-30T04:50:00.000Z

Observatory 2.1.1 is now available on the Mac App Store.

It contains a workaround for a regression Apple introduces in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.2 that affects the thumbnail generation by Observatory’s Quick Look extension. Also fixed is an issue with the Quick Look preview image scale overlay.

Release notes.

Ready for macOS Sequoia

2024-09-16T12:00:00.000Z

We are excited to announce that Observatory 2.1 is fully compatible with macOS 15 Sequoia, which Apple is releasing today. Apple always introduces regressions in new major macOS releases, and this one is no different, but after testing Observatory 2.1 with the release candidate we found no more issues with it or its Quick Look and Spotlight extensions.

Observatory 2 requires an Observatory 2 license in order for it to run on macOS Sequoia. Observatory 1 is not supported.

Hello Observatory 2.1

2024-09-05T16:35:00.000Z

As mentioned in the previous post about the end of Observatory 1 support, today we are releasing Observatory 2.1, which adds several exciting new features.

Nested Albums

Early on in the development of Observatory, the decision was made to have albums only contain images, and use folders as containers for albums and smart albums. That made sense from the point of view of image libraries, but in practice turned out to be very confusing when importing images, and even more so when we introduced watched source folders in Observatory 1.4.2.

In Observatory 2.1 we finally got rid of this limitation by merging the functionality of folders and albums in the Library Navigator. It’s a big internal change, but this makes it much easier to reflect the structure of the file system in the image library.

What’s more is that we added an option to the import sheet for automatically watching source folders. This allows Observatory to keep the library synchronized with the file system without the need to manually configure this for each and every source folder individually.

Integration Reports

With all those light, dark, flat and bias images in your library, you sometimes wish to have an overview of all exposures for a given target. Although you can filter images by object name, and Observatory shows you the total integration time for selected images, this is a bit cumbersome.

Observatory 2.1 provides an alternative, accessible with the new Integration Reports button in the toolbar. It will produce a quick summary of all lights for your targets, grouped by filter, and for each target provide additional details, grouping the light, dark, flat and bias images, so you can quickly see if you are missing some calibration frames, or you need to expose a few more lights with one of your filters.

Quick Look FITS Headers

You can now inspect FITS headers with our Quick Look extension. The header information is selectable, so you can copy it straight from the Quick Look window.

Comets!

One of our favorite new features in Observatory 2 was the addition of minor planet and dwarf planet position and magnitude estimates. What we especially like about it is that it works even for old images that were exposed over two decades ago.

In Observatory 2.1 we added support for numbered comets in images from 2000 onwards. The perturbations of their orbital elements leads to much larger errors than what is typical for our minor planet calculations, especially around perihelion, but it is usually adequate for automatic image tagging.

Release notes.

Farewell Observatory 1

2024-09-05T15:35:00.000Z

Exactly one year ago we released Observatory 2. It was a major upgrade that took two years to develop, during which we still released updates to Observatory 1.x up to its final release in January 2023 in the form of Observatory 1.6.7.

Enhancing Observatory became increasingly difficult because of its compatibility with OS X 10.11 El Capitan (2015) all the way to macOS 14 Sonoma (2023) and because of its reliance on OpenCL, which was deprecated since macOS 10.14 Mojave (2018). For Observatory 2 we dropped support for all macOS versions before macOS 11 Big Sur (2020), so we could completely overhaul the User Interface, and rewrite its internals to Metal Compute.

We also added tons of new features and greatly improved existing ones, like the new smart plate solver, asteroid positions and magnitudes, the Gaia catalog, a new Quick Look extension with image metadata and overlays, object information, improved tagging and dual monitor support.

New users of Observatory 2 have access to all these features, while users who previously purchased Observatory 1 can unlock them with an In-App Purchase. Observatory 2 runs in a different mode when not unlocked, hiding or disabling most new features. It also still relies on some of the old OpenCL code instead of Metal Compute in this mode.

OpenCL has been obsolete in macOS for 6 years now, and upcoming macOS 15 Sequoia drops the old API that was used by Observatory 1 for Quick Look. That change breaks Quick Look previews in Observatory 1. We finally reached the point to end support for Observatory 1.

What this means is that Observatory 1 will not work correctly on macOS 15 Sequoia, and neither does Observatory 2 when used with an Observatory 1 license. We will not do any further testing of Observatory 2 with the Observatory 1 license, so unless you run Observatory 2 with the Observatory 2 license (i.e. purchased new or as an upgrade), things may start to break.

If you haven’t upgraded to Observatory 2 yet, now is the time. Supporting the upgrade path requires extra work as we add features, hence the upgrade price also increases as time passes. In the first three months after the release of Observatory 2, it was only 30% of its full price. Today it is 50%.

Today we are releasing Observatory 2.1, which adds several exciting new features. You can read more about that in the next post.

Observatory 2.0.8

2024-05-29T10:30:00.000Z

When launching Observatory on macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey or macOS 13 Ventura with the setting “Reopen library windows when launching” enabled, Observatory will restore the library window to its last state. This stopped working in macOS 14 Sonoma. Observatory 2.0.8, now available on the Mac App Store, fixes this, and we took the opportunity to further enhance this feature so more library settings are restored. If you encounter any issue with this feature upon first launching Observatory after this update, please close and reopen the library window, to reset it to its default state.

Another improvement in Observatory 2.0.8 is with the image filtering by object name and tags from the toolbar. Observatory now also looks for the normalized variant of the input in this toolbar search field. So, entering “M1” will search for both “M1” and “M 1”. This works in conjunction with another enhancement: the object identifier of an image is now normalized during importing. So if a FITS header contains “M1”, it will be stored as “M 1” in the library.

Lastly, Observatory now displays a warning before quitting the application if it is importing, plate solving or downloading images. This was already implemented for when you would explicitly close a library window, but if you selected “Quit Observatory” with “Reopen library windows when launching” enabled, it would ignore that.

Release notes.

Observatory 2.0.7

2024-05-03T10:30:00.000Z

In this latest update to Observatory the search field in the toolbar collapses into a button to make room for other items, and it can be used to filter images by the value of their object name attribute. Another change is that images can be sorted by many more fields. Added were sensor temperature, focal length, aperture diameter, azimuth, altitude, album, source folder path, and telescope/camera/guider/observer/observatory name.

A behavioral change of the Quick Look extension is that it now skips the automatic debayering of an image if it is a bias, dark or flat calibration frame. And when importing images you may notice that the FITS HISTORY headers are not added to notes anymore. To see the contents of these headers just choose Image ▸ Show Master FITS Header (⌥⌘I). A description of other changes and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

Observatory 2.0.6

2024-04-07T16:30:00.000Z

In addition to having more control over CPU/GPU/RAM usage, another reason for introducing the manual CPU core allocation setting in 2.0.5 was to get some additional feedback regarding a pesky import bug that has been affecting a few users. Observatory appeared to be leaking an enormous amount of memory during importing for them, or create many threads. This could lead to a crash or even require a complete reboot. Sometimes the import would stall without the user interface actually being frozen.

Both issues were caused by the same bug. It has been fixed in Observatory 2.0.6.

Release notes.

Observatory 2.0.5

2024-03-24T19:30:00.000Z

Observatory 2.0.5 is a bit more conservative with the amount of images it imports simultaneously. Depending on your hardware this change may result in slightly reduced import performance, while RAM usage is roughly halved. Observatory now also allows you to override this automatic concurrency behavior for importing and image processing. You can lower the CPU core allocation manually in the settings if you want to reduce Observatory’s CPU, GPU and RAM usage, or increase it if you want to push your system to its limits.

Another new setting is related to Observatory’s document versioning. This is the feature that lets you restore a library to a previous state. Observatory 2.0.5 allows you to disable it.

The Quick Look extension has improved XISF metadata support and takes the image dimensions into account when opening its window.

More changes are listed in the release notes.

Observatory 2.0.4

2023-12-02T03:00:00.000Z

Observatory 2.0.4 has been released to the Mac App Store.

It adds a neat little feature to show the total integration time when selecting multiple images or stacks. Just select them and it is shown in the Overview Inspector, skipping rejected images for this computation.

The toolbar has been reorganized a bit to make it look better on large displays, and a new menu item View ▸ Canvas ▸ Show Canvas Header was added to display the image name in the new canvas header.

If you’re into Spotlight, you’ll like that it now indexes the SWCREATE and equivalent FITS keyword, and makes it available as the Content Creator search attribute in Spotlight.

Check out the release notes for the complete list of enhancements.

Enjoy!

Upgrade to Observatory 2

2023-11-01T13:35:00.000Z

“I must admit … that I didn’t really understand the advantages that were on offer when I got the upgrade. I expected v2 to offer minor additional functionality plus maybe some bug fixes. … I wasn’t even aware … about the need to make a payment (well worth it by the way) to unlock the upgrade. At which point, the scope of the improvement in going from v1 to v2 became clear.”

It was recently brought to my attention that Observatory 1.x users may not realize the magnitude of the Observatory 2 upgrade. Although you undoubtedly noticed the user interface changes, many of you may not know that Observatory 2 is capable of doing way more than Observatory 1.x.

The Apple Mac App Store doesn’t have a good mechanism for major upgrades where existing users receive a discount, so how this is implemented for Observatory 2 is that users who previously purchased Observatory and have compatible hardware receive the new application as a regular update, but with the new features disabled. Although you received a lot of niceties like the new user interface, plate solver and merged star & deepsky catalogs for free this way, overall it still has mostly the same features as Observatory 1.x in this mode.

Obviously I didn’t communicate this well. It didn’t help that the upgrade information was only shown once, and that a few new features accidentally were enabled without actually upgrading to Observatory 2. Observatory 2.0.3, which has just been released to the Mac App Store fixes this.

As before, user interface elements for features that never existed in Observatory 1.x are disabled. For example limiting overlay magnitudes, quickly toggling all overlays and displaying overlays beyond image boundaries never was possible in Observatory 1.x.

What may not be apparent is that there are many more new features, because they are completely hidden from view unless you upgrade. My personal favorite is the 500,000 minor planets, and the fact that it works for images that were taken up to 23 years ago. With it I found minor planets in my old images of the 2000s that were only discovered a few years before I accidentally captured them. What’s also cool with this feature is that if you believe you captured an image of a minor planet but you don’t know its coordinates, you can just type the name of the minor planet in the plate solver and Observatory will calculate the position and use that as the initial estimate for the plate solver.

Another great new feature is the ability to select any object in an image and access additional information with the new Object Inspector. It will even include links to external resources, including SkySafari. And the new Tag Navigator, where you can select an object and Observatory will highlight the object in your image. Or the ability to have the STF and Overlay panels floating as separate windows and the canvas full screen on a second monitor. And of course, the ability to go as faint as magnitude 20 with the star catalog is simply amazing.

Observatory 2 is a huge upgrade, and there are many more new features than what is listed above. There is a reason why Observatory grew from a 150MB application to a 3GB application. If you didn’t upgrade from Observatory 1.x yet, read more about it and download the limited demo at https://codeobsession.com. The limited demo does not contain the minor planets, but it will give you a good idea of the other capabilities.

Observatory 2.0.3 adds the Object attribute, initialized with the value of the corresponding FITS keyword. You can edit it, and it can be shown in the icon browser subtitle, the list browser and used in smart albums. For existing libraries, close and reopen the library to see the new column. For older libraries, you can instruct Observatory to initialize it by selecting the image(s), choosing Image ▸ Reset… and in there select Metadata Merge and enable Sync Master.

This update also fixes a large GPU memory leak that was not apparent in our tests before. And an issue where selecting images in the browser would sometimes result in extreme CPU usage.

It actually has a ton of little improvements throughout, and you can read about those in its release notes.

Astronomy Technology Today

2023-10-28T02:50:00.000Z

Observatory 2.0 is featured in November 2023 Astronomy Technology Today New Products / Industry News.

Observatory 2.0.2

2023-10-01T04:35:00.000Z

Observatory 2.0.2 is now available on the Mac App Store.

It resolves performance issues for images stored on NAS. Although you should never store an Observatory library file itself on NAS, Observatory requires quick random access to it after all, images can be stored on NAS. For best performance you should store the library files on your computer’s internal SSD or an SSD directly attached to it.

The File menu has a new “Delete Rejected Masters…” item. After an imaging session, drop the folder with your new images onto the Observatory application icon, then use the gallery browser or one with your canvas on a second monitor to quickly scan your images and reject those that are of unacceptable quality by pressing Control-Command-Zero (^⌘0). Afterwards in the browser bar deselect “Accepted” in the Image Type dropdown and you’ll see only those images you are about to remove. After verifying, choose “Delete Rejected Masters…” and Observatory will move all the rejected images to Finder’s trash.

PixInsight 1.8.9-2 was released a few weeks before Observatory 2, and has an important change buried in its release notes. Although it still accepts FITS WCS keywords when opening images, it will ignore them when saving XISF or FITS files. It now only writes astrometric solutions to PixInsight XISF files, and only using XISF properties. It’s a huge compatibility step backwards, as the FITS format and WCS FITS keywords are the standard in the astronomy community. PixInsight 1.8.9-2 still generates linear solutions in addition to its proprietary spline-based distortion corrections, and Observatory 2.0.2 adds support for these linear astrometric solution XISF properties.

The Quick Look preview action menu now also contains the STF option that was introduced in Observatory 2.0.1. It applies to the Quick Look preview and thumbnails. Please note that Quick Look thumbnails are cached by Finder, so changing it may not have any effect until you clear the Quick Look cache and relaunch Finder. Its main intended use is to temporary change how the Quick Look preview is displayed.

Observatory 2.0.2 has many more little improvements, like better asteroid magnitude estimates, a limit on image preview dimensions, a progress bar in the New Library window, and it fixes a few crashes. All changes can be found in the release notes.

Best New Apps and Updates on Mac App Store

2023-09-16T15:35:00.000Z

Astrophotography has reached the front page of the Mac App Store! Open it and you will see Observatory 2 listed under Best New Apps and Updates. In the US Mac App Store it is currently shown on the front page.

Observatory 2.0.1

2023-09-10T20:35:00.000Z

A small update to Observatory 2 has just been released to the Mac App Store.

Observatory 2.0.1 fixes the “System is critically low on memory” alert a few users were reporting. This alert was implemented all the way back in Observatory 1.1 and intended for systems with a harddisk as their main storage device. Observatory 2 uses significantly less memory than Observatory 1.x and this alert is now obsolete, hence it has been removed.

There’s also a new “STF type” option in the General Settings for changing the default STF used by the canvas, thumbnails, exporting and sharing. This is useful if you only have processed images in your libraries.

Other changes can be found in the release notes.

Welcome to Your New Observatory!

2023-09-05T15:35:00.000Z

Observatory 1.0 was released on April 25, 2016, when OS X 10.11 El Capitan reigned. It has received many updates over the years, adding many new capabilities while maintaining compatibility with OS X 10.11 all the way to the upcoming macOS 14 Sonoma. Its most recent incarnation is Observatory 1.6.7, released earlier this year, and like many releases before it it runs natively on Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

Today we unleash the next major version of Observatory. It requires macOS 11 Big Sur or later. If you purchased Observatory 1.x and have a compatible system, you will automatically receive it.

A lot has changed.

Observatory’s user interface has been completely overhauled, making it more modern, powerful and much easier to use. Advanced searches can now be performed without creating a smart album, image calibration has been streamlined, and the new plate solver automatically adjusts itself to your imaging setup. Stacks are now cached, and there’s no need for creating a managed master from them to add adjustments, plate solve or use them for calibration. The orientation of images also has changed, to match other software. Importing performance has greatly improved and you can now continue using Observatory while importing or plate solving is in progress. The new rendering engine is Metal based 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 has many more new features:

Tagging and overlaying the positions of our solar system’s planets and 500,000 asteroids in images from the year 2000 onwards;
New watched folder features for keeping your libraries in sync with the file system, automatically importing images, creating albums and stacks;
An enhanced Quick Look extension with image metadata and for plate solved images, scale, orientation & grid overlays;
A Tag navigator to manipulate tags and display all images with a given tag. With a tag selected, Observatory even highlights the selected object in your plate solved images and displays additional information in its new Object inspector;
Dual monitor support: display images in a separate window or on a second monitor;
Magnitude limits for overlays and automatic tagging;
Display the most relevant image information in the new Overview inspector;
Select multiple images and export them as a movie;
Floating overlay, STF and activity panels; When dropping images onto the Observatory icon, they can now automatically be combined into a single library; Virtual Observatory adds ZTF search; there’s a new magnifier panel; and much, much more.

If you purchased Observatory 1.x before, these new features are available for a deeply discounted “Upgrade from Observatory 1” In-App purchase. If you are new to Observatory and 2.x is your first purchase, then these features are included already.

Enjoy!

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

Release notes.

Observatory 1.6.7

2023-01-15T03:35:00.000Z

Observatory 1.6.7 has been released to the Mac App Store.

It improves the handling of WCS FITS headers generated by PixInsight. This fixes the overlays for images that have been plate solved with PixInsight.

Release notes.