Mac Observatory

Sven ran the same 1,999 solar videos through Strata and Planetary System Stacker on the same Mac. Strata took 19.65 hours. PSS took 7.2. His logs found a GPU bug that was invisible on my own hardware.

EdgeHD focus data: 694 autofocus runs, one temperature coefficient, and a probe that lied for 23 nights

A deep-sky framing calculator that overlays your sensor on real survey imagery and counts your guide stars, and a planetary calculator that places any planet and its moons on your chip for any date and time, then finds your frame-rate ceiling. Both free, both in the browser, no account.

Strata 1.0 is on the Mac App Store. The third stacking engine I wrote, six months of beta, 367 pieces of feedback, and the testers who shaped every part of it.

Frame rate is the spec that splits the two categories, and it costs more than the spec sheets admit. Measured on an EdgeHD 8, with a pixel scale calculator to check your own combination.

Ephemeris now keeps a library of every night your rig has recorded, tells you what it notices across them, and always says where each observation came from.

Venus near dichotomy, twenty minutes after sunset, in seeing Laminar rated as poor. 10,000 frames at 347 fps through an EdgeHD 8 and a 2.5x Powermate, captured in Laminar and stacked, sharpened, and colored in Strata.

Meridian, the native macOS deep sky archive manager, is now on the Mac App Store. Fourteen rounds of beta, 93 bug reports, and the features that exist because testers sent me email.

Eight free updates since the 1.5.0 release. QHY joins full production, Laminar now measures your drives and plans captures around them, and a capture-engine rebuild you can feel in the interface.

Transit is a new Mac-native menu bar app that watches for astronomical events and notifies you with enough lead time to actually get outside. Here's why I built it.

Laminar 1.5 applies dark, flat, and hot pixel correction to the live preview as you focus and tune, with in-app capture wizards, a per-camera master library, and import for existing FITS and SER masters.

Over 15 hours of integration on a spiral in the Virgo Cluster, and a short story about a frontier rancher on the galaxy's outer limb who watches ram pressure strip his world bare, fires off a claim against the universe, and gets paid back with interest.

Build 14 is on TestFlight. A simplified Solar Tone, planetary protection under Deconvolution, fail-fast stacks, and an honest look at what's still coming.

Laminar 1.2.5 brings camera-side white balance directly into the Inspector, graduates the ToupTek OEM family and SVBONY out of Beta, and adds initial support for Celestron webcam-style astronomy cameras alongside generic UVC video devices including iPhone via Continuity Camera.

Laminar 1.2.3 finishes the editable Custom ROI workflow with eight resize handles and numeric entry, refactors live preview onto a Metal-direct path, and graduates the SVBONY SV305C PRO and ToupTek Astro G3M678C out of Beta after hardware testing.

After five and a half years of Rosetta 2, PixInsight finally runs as a native ARM64 binary on M-series Macs. I tested it on my Mac Studio M3 Ultra and the CPU score nearly doubled.