Observatory 1.5 is now available on the Mac App Store.

There’s no need for an internet connection to read the documentation anymore, as the application now includes it all. The documentation has also been enhanced, and a whole new section was added with solutions for specific goals. And it’s searchable!

You can now adjust the blink speed with the backward/forward buttons, or simply by pressing the ⌘[ and ⌘] keys. When not blinking these buttons now also wrap around, making it easier to focus on images in your selection.

The readability of the overlay labels has been improved, we fixed some bugs and even some crashes. The complete list of changes can be found in the release notes.

Enjoy!

The Mac Power Users podcast aired a great episode with Andrew Burwell where they talk about astrophotography using Apple products. At the 23 minute mark Andrew talks about how he uses Observatory.

Mac Power Users – Episode #524: Photographing the stars

We’ve just released Observatory 1.4.4 on the Mac App Store, a minor update focused on bug fixes.

Changes in the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey service caused SMSSS searches to fail in Virtual Observatory. This issue has been fixed. We also improved the rating indicator for systems running macOS 10.13 or later.

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

Today Acorn 6.5.1 was released, fixing a bug which was introduced a while back that prevented it from loading third-party plugins like our own Acorn Plugin for FITS, XISF and SBIG images.

With the plugin working again in Acorn, today we released an enhanced version of it. When you open a FITS, XISF or SBIG image with help of the plugin, this new version automatically switches Acorn’s image editing workflow to True Color (8 bits per channel), Deep Color (16 bpc) or Really Deep Color (32 bpc), depending on the pixel data. Previously it always set it to the 32 bpc workflow, even if lowering it would not result in any dynamic range loss. Since many astronomical images are 16 bpc, this enhancement may improve performance and save you some disk space. You can still manually change it with Acorn’s Image ▸ Image Depth menu as before.

About 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.

About our Plugin

After installing the plugin, you can open FITS, XISF and SBIG images with Acorn as easy as a JPEG or TIFF while maintaining the dynamic range in your images. The plugin is free, but you do need Observatory and Acorn to use it. It’s a great addition to Observatory’s Quick Look and Spotlight plugins for the same image formats.

More information about the plugin and the download link can be found in the User Guide. Full release notes are here.

Importing and stacking images got a lot easier today with the release of Observatory 1.4.3 on the Mac App Store.

Source folders are now optional, and you can just drop images or folders on your library window to import them. For empty libraries there’s a drop zone that you can click to select your images and folders.

Because Observatory is build around the concept of image libraries, previously you couldn’t just open and view individual images with it. But now you can. It creates a temporary library with just that image. Use it to quickly inspect an image, its metadata, apply nondestructive adjustments, plate solve, overlay catalog data, and more.

You can now stack images while they are still in Inbox. There’s no need to first move them to an album anymore. Stacks can now be moved or copied to another album using the corresponding menu item or by dragging them. Press the option (⌥) key to copy. To move a stack back to Inbox, choose “Image ▸ Remove From Album”.

We improved the compatibility with older hardware, resolved a crash when using certain GPUs as compute device, and a performance regression triggered by low memory.

Full release notes.