We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our new FITS, XISF (PixInsight) and SBIG image plugins for Acorn.

Acorn by Flying Meat Inc. is a powerful image editor for macOS that supports nondestructive levels, curves and filters, layer masks, batch editing and many tools that work on pixels, text and shapes. It supports images with 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel. And you don’t need a subscription. It is a cost-effective solution for post-processing astronomical images.

After installing the plugins, you can open FITS, XISF and SBIG images with Acorn as easy as a JPEG or TIFF. The plugins are free, but you do need Observatory and Acorn to use them. They are a great addition to Observatory’s Quick Look and Spotlight plugins for the same image formats.

We’ve just updated the Welcome article of the documentation, and added a new Getting Started section. It describes the basic processing workflow of calibrating, stacking, aligning and plate solving images in Observatory.

Enjoy!

Check the Mac App Store for updates, because we’ve just released Observatory 1.0.8.

It improves the background gradient handling of the plate solver and align adjustment. It also fixes the issue of stacks not being updated after selecting different picks. And we resolved a bug that we believe may have been the cause of thumbnails occasionally shifting down in the image strip browser on macOS Sierra. We have not been able to consistently reproduce this issue though, so if you still see it after this update, then please contact us.

See the release notes for the complete list.

We’ve just released Observatory 1.0.7 on the Mac App Store, a minor update focused on bug fixes.

It resolves a spike in memory usage immediately after importing. We’ve also made importing 30% faster by fixing some inefficiencies and generating the image thumbnails during the import instead of immediately after it.

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

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!