Check the Mac App Store, because we’ve just released an update to Observatory.

It resolves various bugs that conspired against the plate solver and align adjustment.

There’s a new Automatic Detection Sensitivity setting for the plate solver, and when it fails to find a solution, it now has a handy “Retry” button to quickly retry it with adjusted settings. It also displays more helpful information and a link to the relevant section in the documentation.

Also new is the “Forums” command in the Help menu for quick access to our recently launched Code Obsession Forums. And it fixes a few macOS High Sierra specific issues.

Oh and we made this tumultuous world a little bit safer by securing our website with HTTPS.

For the full set of release notes, head here.

Enjoy!

We have just set up the Code Obsession Forums on our website. Please join if you want to discuss the use of Observatory and related issues with us or other users.

You can view discussions without subscribing. However, if you wish to post to a board, or receive new posts via email, you must join the forums first. To join, just visit its web page and choose the “Register” link.

These forums are not official support channels. Anyone who encounters a problem with our software (or isn’t sure if it’s working correctly), or who would like to request a feature or enhancement, should contact tech support directly for assistance.

It’s always truly exciting when one of your products is reviewed, and especially if it is in a major astronomy publication like Sky & Telescope. If you have not done so, please check out the S&T Test Report section on pages 60–63 of the March 2018 Sky & Telescope.

After reading the review, there’s a few items I wanted to point out:

• Explicitly adding a source folder is only necessary if you want to selectively import images of that folder. The reason for this two-step process is that Observatory is sandboxed, i.e., macOS prevents it from accessing any file or folder unless explicitly permitted by the user.

• We have received a few reports of problems with the plate solver and image registration. These issues will be addressed in the next maintenance update (1.2.1). Please make sure to always report any such issues.

Thank you Sky & Telescope and Richard S. Wright, Jr. for the review!

Today we released an update to Observatory that enhances its nondestructive preprocessing workflow. It adds eight new adjustments:

• Cosmetic Correction – Identify or correct hot and cold pixels in your image.

• Flatten Background – Reduce or eliminate gradients caused by instrumental vignetting or light pollution.

• Chromatic Align – Counter the effects of atmospheric dispersion by aligning the channels of an RGB image.

• Background Neutralization – Equalize the red, green and blue components of an RGB image to yield a neutral gray rendition of the sky background.

• Color Balance – Adjust the white balance of an RGB image.

• Debayer – Convert a Bayer-encoded grayscale image to an RGB image.

• Grayscale – Convert an RGB image into a grayscale image.

• RGB – Convert a grayscale image into an RGB image.

The effects of a few of these adjustments is shown below. All of these adjustments work without the hassle of intermediate files.

Other improvements and changes

There’s a new “Copy Pick Adjustments…” command to help you apply adjustments in a stack more quickly, Virtual Observatory adds support for the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey archive, and the Quick Look plugin now automatically debayers images when needed.

We have also combined the three FITS, SBIG and XISF Acorn plugins into a single plugin. If you have the previous three Acorn plugins installed in Acorn’s App Support Folder, then you should remove them and replace them by the new one. It now also automatically debayers images when needed. You will notice that the “Observatory ▸ Install Extras…” command was removed. Apple requested us to do so because including the Acorn plugins in the application violated the Mac App Store Review Guidelines. It is once again a separate download from our website, as was the case before 1.1.

Full release notes here.

Observatory is available from the Mac App Store.

In case you didn’t look at Observatory’s documentation lately, you may want to choose Help ▸ Observatory Help or go straight to our website.

It is now much easier to navigate. It is Safari Reader friendly and you can add it to Safari’s Reading List for offline reading, or export it as a single PDF file.

We’ve also updated it with the enhancements that were introduced in Observatory 1.1 and 1.1.1.

Today we released Observatory 1.1.1. It modernizes the sidebar, allows you to edit an image version’s name directly in the image browser, tweaks things here and there and fixes several bugs. Read more about it in the release notes.