Observatory for Mac

Observatory has everything you need to seriously curate your astronomical images. Organize your astronomical research images. Search 10+ professional image archives simultaneously. Create master bias, dark and flat frames. Calibrate, normalize, align, stack and adjust your FITS, XISF (PixInsight), SBIG, and RAW images, all nondestructively.

Features

• A flexible hierarchy: create a library for each of your research projects and keep your images organized with albums, smart albums and folders. Let Observatory keep track of your images, without copying, moving or altering them.
• Observatory automatically normalizes the image metadata in its libraries, categorizes images, and supports metadata bulk editing. You can also manually tag, rate, color code, reject or archive images. And you can add notes or attach important reference material to your images and albums.
• Virtual Observatory: search 10+ professional archives simultaneously and download research images from:
  • European Southern Observatory
  • W. M. Keck Observatory
  • Gemini Observatory
  • Hubble Space Telescope
  • Spitzer Space Telescope
  • WISE Space Telescope
  • Palomar Transient Factory
  • Two Micron All Sky Survey
  • Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  • Digitized Sky Survey
• Stacking: manually stack images to obtain the best signal to noise ratio, or let Observatory autostack for you. It can even assign a weight to each image in the stack, based on various criteria.
• Nondestructively calibrate, normalize, align, rotate, resize, bin or crop images. You can create multiple versions of your image, compare images side by side or blink them.
• Overlay the 3.5 million stars, galaxies and other objects of the Messier, NGC/IC, Tycho-2 and PGC 2003 catalogs, or use the UCAC4 and USNO-A2.0 catalogs for an additional 500 million stars.
• Astrometric Matching: if some of your images lack the information to relate image pixels to actual sky coordinates, Observatory’s plate solver will help you find the best match, using its built-in catalogs, as well as the UCAC4 and USNO-A2.0 catalogs.
• Measure: image statistics, aperture photometry, PSF fitting and astrometry.
• QuickLook and Spotlight: preview FITS, XISF (PixInsight) and SBIG images directly from within the Finder and have it display useful information like image dimensions, exposure time, focal length, detector temperature, right ascension and declination. With Observatory, you can search for this information even from within the Finder itself.