Observatory 4+

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!

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

What do you do with the organized or unorganized chaos of your astrophotography library of images as you continue to add to it over time? I end up with dozens and dozens of folders within folders sorted by date and object. Well, Observatory has shown that there’s a better way.

After importing your images (which is just a reference to your files on your drive, so very litle addition space is required) you can plate solve them for automatic tagging by all the known astronomical databases. The benefit of this is that any object you’ve purposely captured, or objects you inadvertently captured are tagged in your images. You can then create smart folders, which then subdivide your set of images into nice little categories like galaxies, nebulas, planetary nebulas, etc. Additionally you can batch tag your images with equipemnt you used, and also have those same images flow into smart folders for sets of equipment you used. The benefit being that you might have imaged a smaller galaxy or object with a wide FOV set of equipemnt, and you want to revisit that object with a narrow FOV set of equipment. This could really help in planning your imaging sessions going forward. And if you’re a completionist like I am, and intend to image the whole Messier catalog, this is a great way to keep track of that.

There are some light weight stacking, and calibration features that work well for one shot color cameras, which take folders of hundreds of images and display them in a single stack to mitigate the clutter. I would like to see some way to integrate mono channels into single stacks by selecting each channel and assigning it a color.

Additionally, a small, but powerful feature of adding astronomical image types to quicklook is amazingly beneficial. No more loading images to see what they are, when you can select one in the finder and press the space bar to see it instantly.

Some things I’d like to see come to a future version are better management of equipment, since this is only done through tagging right now. But I would like some place to store equipment I own, so it’s easier to select when tagging images. I’d also like to see FOV overlays of my equipment on some of research portions of the data. It would be great to pull up a hubble image and see how my gear could frame it, and what might be the best possible set of gear to use when planning a session on a particular object. Other information like object rise and set time based on my location would be beneficial for planning sessions.

In all though, this is a great v1 of a cataloging application for astronomical images. I look forward to what v2 can bring.