Today we released Observatory 1.0.5, an important update for PixInsight users.

In this release, we’ve added support for the XISF image format. XISF is the native file format of PixInsight, an image processing software platform designed specifically for astronomical imaging. You can now import these images in addition to FITS, SBIG, DNG, NEF, CR2, TIFF, JPG, and many more image formats.

We also added the capability to open a master image in an external editor, like PixInsight, directly from Observatory. And because Observatory now actively monitors master images to detect if they were altered or deleted, it is very easy to keep your libraries in sync with the file system.

We didn’t stop there though. We have added something that we thought PixInsight was dearly missing: Quick Look and Spotlight plugins for XISF images! This is in addition to the FITS and SBIG plugins that we added previously to Observatory. What this means is that you can preview your XISF images and display metadata in Finder itself, and use Spotlight to find these images by some of their metadata.

There is more to this release than PixInsight support though, like extensive drag & drop support. You can now organize images by just dragging them to albums, or you can stack images by just dropping them on each other.

Also exciting is the new ability to drop a Finder folder onto the Observatory application icon. This will create a new library with all images in the folder and its subfolders. It’s a great way to quickly inspect last night’s images. And it can serve as a starting point for a much larger library as well.

Another bonus: greatly enhanced documentation.

Check for updates via the App Store application and read the full release notes here.

Observatory is featured in the November 2016 Sky & Telescope New Product Showcase.

We’ve just released Observatory 1.0.4 – a fresh new release with a few big things.

Browser

As soon as you select a folder, album, or smart album in the sidebar, the brand new Focus Bar will appear at the top of the browser.

It gives you a good excuse to collapse the sidebar (⌘0), and focus on that one area of your library, for example a single album. If that album contains stacks, and you select one, the Focus Bar will show an additional button: Focus on Stack, which when clicked (or by pressing ^⌘[) will take your focus to the stack itself and the images it is made of.

When focused on a stack, the Focus Bar displays three nifty buttons that allow you to quickly select the stack’s pick image, all images comprising the stack, or the stacked image itself.

No more inline stack expansion, which didn’t scale well, but a more focused approach.

Virtual Observatory

The Virtual Observatory has gained four more archives:

• Gemini Observatory
• Palomar Transient Factory
• WISE
• Spitzer

That’s a lot of extra image data, and to help you get a hold of it, you can now filter the search results. For example, if you only want to include images obtained with the Hubble ACS instrument, you might enter “ACS” in the new text field towards the bottom of the Virtual Observatory.

Fixes, and more

We’ve made improvements throughout the application. For example, the “Edit” button in the inspectors was in the way of efficient metadata editing, so we removed it. You can now double click stacks and images to quickly focus on them. And importing folders of images doesn’t create superfluous folders in your library anymore.

Enjoy!

Full release notes here.

Today we released Observatory 1.0.3. As announced in the previous blog post, it now includes Spotlight Importers for FITS and SBIG files. This means that, when choosing File ▸ Get Info (⌘I) for such files in Finder, it will now display useful information like image dimensions, exposure time, detector temperature, right ascension, declination, etc. What’s more, you can now search for this information right from within Finder itself!

Creating a new library has been tweaked slightly, such that you don’t need to provide a name for it until you explicitly save it. A small change, but with it comes support for the Tabs feature of macOS Sierra, the next major version of OS X macOS this fall.

There are disk space utilization optimizations, Virtual Observatory returns results faster, and Observatory now displays a notification whenever there’s an update on this Observatory Blog.

Loading and displaying images is up to 40% faster. This has steadily been improving over the last few releases as you can see in the graph below. The system-level support for RAW images is inherently slower than Observatory’s FITS handling, but there’s still room for further improvements.

Aside from that, you’ll see several other improvements in Virtual Observatory, importing, the sidebar, and more. For all the little details, you can head here.

When you have Observatory installed on your Mac, you’ll notice that all your FITS and SBIG files suddenly are displayed with proper thumbnails instead of generic icons in Finder. After selecting any of them, you only need to press Spacebar on your keyboard to see the full image.

It is a great feature, which also extends to the sheet presented when importing images into an Observatory library.

The next update of Observatory will deepen this kind of integration, by automatically extracting metadata from all your FITS and SBIG files, regardless of whether they are part of any Observatory library.

You can see the new metadata in Finder by selecting one or more files and choosing File ▸ Get Info (⌘I).

It includes bits like

• Image dimensions
• Telescope, focal length, detector and filter used for the observation
• Exposure duration in seconds
• Right ascension and declination of the target

As you can see from the next screenshot, this metadata also greatly enhances the FITS and SBIG image search capabilities of your system. And if your images contain WCS information, you can now even look for those within a specific area of the sky, right from your Finder!

This is going to be a great update, with more optimizations and bug fixes, and it’s coming soon!