Observatory 2 is a major upgrade of Observatory.

Its user interface has been completely overhauled, making it more powerful and easier to use. Image overlay and display settings have been enhanced, image calibration has been streamlined, advanced searches can now be performed without creating a Smart Album, and the new Plate Solver automatically adjusts itself to your imaging setup. The orientation of images has changed, to match other software, and internal enhancements include the move from OpenCL to Metal Compute, and concurrent importing and plate solving. USNO-A2.0 and UCAC4 catalog support has been replaced by an internal Gaia catalog up to magnitude 16.

All these updates are free when you purchased Observatory 1.x before.

But that’s not all. Observatory 2 has many more new features:

• Tagging and overlaying the positions of our solar system’s planets and 500,000 asteroids in images from the year 2000 onwards;
• New Watched Folder features to automatically keep your libraries in sync with your file system;
• An enhanced Quick Look extension with image metadata and for plate solved images, scale, orientation & grid overlays;
• A Tag navigator to manipulate tags and conveniently display all images with a given tag. With a tag selected, Observatory even highlights the selected object in your plate solved images;
• An Object inspector with additional information for selected objects;
• Display the selected image in a separate window or on a second monitor;
• Magnitude limits for overlays and automatic tagging;
• Display overlays beyond the image boundaries, so you don’t miss that interesting object right beyond the FOV during an imaging session;
• The new Overview inspector displays the most relevant image information;
• Select multiple images and export them as a movie;
• The Median & HFD values of images are now computed during import so you can quickly determine which one to keep and which one to discard;
• Floating overlay, STF and activity panels; When dropping images onto the Observatory icon, they can now automatically be combined into a single library; Virtual Observatory adds ZTF search; there’s a new magnifier panel; and much, much more.

If you purchased Observatory 1.x before, these new features are available for a deeply discounted “Upgrade from Observatory 1” In-App purchase. If you are new to Observatory and 2.x is your first purchase, then these features are included already.

In addition, with an optional In-App purchase the internal Gaia catalog can be expanded all the way to magnitude 20. That’s more than 800 million stars in total!