Observatory 1.5.3 has been released to the Mac App Store.

The Calibrate adjustment now tolerates small differences in ISO speed, pedestal, gain and exposure duration for its calibration frame validation. This solves the issue where the calibration frame selections sometimes didn‘t list the expected master calibration frames.

The adjustment also gained the new option to skip most of the validation altogether. So if some of the metadata is incorrect, or you want to calibrate your image with a flat taken at a different sensor temperature, now you can without having to manually edit the metadata.

Release notes.

Observatory 1.5.2 is available on the Mac App Store.

New in this release is that Observatory now always reopens libraries upon launching. Previously this behavior was determined by the “Close windows when quitting an app” setting of the General System Preferences, but since this setting is turned on by default, many users were not aware of this feature in Observatory.

Another improvement is related to the decrease in contrast of successive macOS releases. These changes affected the legibility of inspector, browser and editor labels in Observatory. This has been fixed.

The largest change however is one that becomes relevant only later this year. Observatory is now compatible with Apple silicon! Right now Apple doesn‘t allow us to release a universal binary that runs natively on Apple silicon and natively on Intel-based Mac computers, but Observatory is now compatible with Rosetta 2 translation on Big Sur.

Release notes.

Enjoy!

Observatory 1.5.1 is featured in July 2020 Astronomy Technology Today New Products / Industry News.

Today we released Observatory 1.5.1 on the Mac App Store, an update that focuses on some of its core features.

We expanded the user guide with new articles about organizing images with Observatory and smart albums, and we added 21 (twenty-one!) additional criteria to smart albums, bringing the total to 33. You can mix and match new criteria such as ISO speed, focal length, detector temperature and constellation with existing ones to organize your images like never before. We have also fixed a few issues with some of the existing criteria, and you now only have to double-click a smart album to edit it, instead of having to use the contextual menu. Furthermore we have improved the performance of image libraries, opening and closing them faster, and selecting any folder, album or smart album yields results faster.

There‘s now support for camera field rotators. The rotator angle is extracted from images upon importing, and taken into account when calibrating and auto-stacking. This new information is available in the version inspector and as an optional column in the list browser.

Exporting master images has been tweaked a little bit, such that exporting a FITS or SBIG master image with its original dimensions just copies the original file. For managed master images this has always been the case, but now this behavior is also extended to regular masters.

We also fixed a range of smaller issues, such as missing titles and upscaling when exporting to PDF, an issue with opening recent libaries from the Welcome window, a regression that resulted in ESO hierarchical FITS keywords in exported images, and a bug in galaxy overlay position angles.

Release notes.

Enjoy!

Today marks the fourth anniversary of Observatory launching on April 25, 2016. To mark the occasion, below we reflect on some of the key features added to Observatory over the last four years.

2016

Upon launch Observatory supported five image archives in its Virtual Observatory feature. Within the first few months we added six more, and added search results filtering. Initially it only shipped with Quick Look support for FITS and SBIG images, but in this year we also added Quick Look support for XISF images, and Spotlight support for all three image file formats. The release of macOS Sierra forced a complete overhaul of Observatory’s image browser, which delayed our planned optimizations and documentation, but the end result with the new focus bar was a great enhancement. We added extensive drag & drop support, the ability to detect changes to master images after importing, and the documentation was ready just before the year’s end.

2017

Although we had been improving Observatory’s performance throughout 2016, it was still a year where we mainly focused on adding features. 2017 was the year of optimizations. Observatory became much faster throughout, used less memory and now remained responsive while loading, processing and stacking images. We also made many improvements to the user interface, introduced the plugin for Acorn and the limited Observatory Demo. Up to that point, the only way to try it was to buy it, so this was obviously a welcome improvement.

2018

This year our focus was back on major new features. Soon after the year started we added nondestructive adjustments like Cosmetic Correction, Flatten Background and Chromatic Align. The Quick Look plugins now automatically debayer images when needed, and for our users in the Southern Hemisphere we added one more image archive to Virtual Observatory. Observatory gained support for blind plate solving, and we enhanced its photometry capabilities. Overlays for confirmed exoplanet host stars, variable and double stars were added, and we worked with the developers of SkySafari to open Sky Charts directly from Observatory. We even enhanced the user interface for Dark Mode.

2019

Having added so many new features in the previous year, our focus moved to the more subtle enhancements, like watched source folders, to make it easier to use Observatory during an imaging session. We lifted important restrictions in the user interface, and focused on making Observatory easier to use.

Looking ahead at 2020

In our first update this year we have integrated the documentation with the application itself, so it can be searched, and we have made many smaller enhancements and bug fixes. Some of these are actually very significant, like crashes, which already were quite rare. I am happy to report that we have not received a single crash report since this last update six weeks ago.

Looking ahead, well, I’m sure Apple has more surprises coming at us this year. Hopefully not as problematic as macOS Sierra in 2016 or High Sierra in 2017. Regardless if Apple manages to not disrupt the plans too much, you can once again look out for many more great enhancements to Observatory this year!