Observatory 4+

Your astrophotography library

Code Obsession, LLC

    • 4.5 • 46 Ratings
    • $79.99
    • Offers In-App Purchases

Screenshots

Description

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.

Its integration reports provide a quick summary of all exposures for a given target. Add notes, plate solve, and automatically tag your images to identify galaxies, clusters, nebula, variable stars, exoplanet host stars, planets, dwarf planets, minor planets and comets. 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 and FITS headers 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.

What’s New

Version 2.1.1

• Fix initial Quick Look preview overlay scale.

Ratings and Reviews

4.5 out of 5
46 Ratings

46 Ratings

Kammermusik ,

Fantastic!

I imported over 19,000 images without any issues. I especially like the tagging feature. All of my images were automatically tagged with objects within each frame, and it’s easy to use the tag navigator to explore other images with similar tags. Pixinsight can annotate images to label objects, but Observatory does this automatically, so each image that you open is automatically annotated, which is very useful. I also like the fact that I can click on any star or object in the image to get details on that star, with options to search online databases to get more information. My favorite feature is the observatory persona, where I can search 13 different online image archives, including Hubble images. If my image is plate solved, this search automatically finds online archives at the same coordinates. There are many other interesting and useful features I haven’t mentioned. It’s obvious that the programmer has evolved this software over many years to make it as useful as possible to those of us with thousands of images. Support is also fantastic. My questions have been answered quickly and thoroughly. I highly recommend this app.

wglow ,

Amazing way to exlore and organize astro photos

I have been using Observatory for over two years, I think since its first release and it has gotten better and more responsive with each update. It is a perfect app to organize all your personally taken images. You can also search for images from multiple online catalogs like the DDS, SDSS, 2MASS ... Five thumbs up!

idonotwanttohaveanickname ,

Excellent Software

This is excellent software. Photo editing and organization with plate solving. The one thinng that would make it better is if you could plate solve without having to download 10GB of database files

App Privacy

The developer, Code Obsession, LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Usage Data
  • Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Supports

  • Family Sharing

    Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.