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.

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.

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.

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 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.