App: Observatory
Developer: Code Obsession, LLC
Genres: Photo & Video, Education

Observatory is the image management application specifically designed for astrophotography. Organize your images with tags, albums and smart albums. Create master bias, dark and flat frames. Calibrate, register, stack and adjust your images, all nondestructively, and without creating any intermediate files or accidentally modifying your master images.

Add notes, plate solve, and automatically tag your images to identify galaxies, clusters, nebula, variable stars, exoplanet host stars, planets, dwarf planets and minor planets in your images. Observatory even lets you find and download research images from professional ground-based observatories and space telescopes.

With Observatory, your Mac also gains the ability to display thumbnails and previews of astronomical FITS, XISF and SBIG images in Finder and other applications. It shows you metadata in the previews and for plate solved images includes the scale and image orientation. And it helps Spotlight index the right metadata, so you can quickly find your images.

STANDARD FEATURES

• Quick Look & Spotlight plugins for FITS, XISF and SBIG images.
• Plate solver.
• Overlays and object information from a catalog of 60 million stars, 500,000 minor planets, and a million other astronomical objects.
• Watched folders for keeping your libraries in sync with the file system, automatically importing images, creating albums and stacks.
• Create as many libraries as you wish and keep your images organized without copying, moving or altering the master images.
• A nondestructive preprocessing workflow without the hassle of intermediate files.

	⁃ Calibration
	⁃ Cosmetic Correction
	⁃ Binning
	⁃ Debayering
	⁃ Background Neutralization
	⁃ Color Balance
	⁃ Flatten Background
	⁃ Chromatic Align
	⁃ Register
	⁃ Normalize
	⁃ Stack
	⁃ Resize
	⁃ Rotate
	- Mirror
	- Flip
	⁃ Crop

• Virtual Observatory: find and download research images from professional ground-based observatories and space telescopes.

	⁃ European Southern Observatory
	⁃ W. M. Keck Observatory
	⁃ Gemini Observatory
	⁃ Hubble Space Telescope
	⁃ Spitzer Space Telescope
	⁃ WISE Space Telescope
	⁃ Palomar Transient Factory
	- Zwicky Transient Facility
	⁃ Two Micron All Sky Survey
	⁃ Sloan Digital Sky Survey
	⁃ Digitized Sky Survey
	⁃ SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey

• Image statistics, aperture photometry, PSF fitting and astrometry.
• Export images as PDF, other image formats, as a movie or print them.

OPTIONAL FEATURES (VIA IN-APP PURCHASE)

• Up to 750 million additional stars for the Gaia star catalog, extending the default magnitude 16 limit to magnitude 20.

SUPPORT

If you have any feedback or questions, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us by email at support@codeobsession.com.

Release notes:
• Display total exposure duration when selecting multiple images or stacks.
• Optionally display the image name in the canvas header.
• Reorganize toolbar.