DeAstroStacker 0.11.5

DeAstroStacker 0.11.5. Everything since 0.11.2: the app explains itself to an
AI client, the stars of three filters become a picture you can work on, and
PixInsight reads the sky the right way up.

Driving it from an AI client

Every step has a page on the Menu, written beside the code it runs. A page
says where the step goes on a Line, what its Auto measures, the trap that looks
as if it worked, how to read its note, and the algorithm itself. A client reads
menu instead of trusting a skill written against another build, which is how
one session set a target on an mtf Stretch that never reads one.

A night through the connector costs about 25 KB to read, down from 193 KB.
Answers carry their own result, so no show call follows each action, and jobs
wait until they land. ticket_show gives the stage, the next step and the
questions only you can answer. A client can read a Line, taste it, edit it as a
list of edits, try it on a proxy in seconds and look at the result. Finished
masters go straight to the Season, and Omakase runs the whole night as one job
and stops at the first open question.

• A connector ends when you are done. Claude Desktop keeps two connectors
  running for as long as it is open, each holding the app's files, and an update
  stopped on "the following applications are using files". connector_stop
  ends one, five hours with no call ends it too, and the installer stops any
  connector running from the folder it replaces.
• Every build carries its own skill. Settings installs the newest skill that
  fits this app, from what it holds, what is published and what it shipped with,
  so it works offline. Apps up to 0.11.4 stay on the 1.x skill; 0.11.5 reads
  skill 2.
• A Special has a Menu page too, and its author writes it. specials check
  says what a page is missing, by the rules this app's own steps are held to,
  and checks the next version of a Special you already have installed, which
  used to collide with the installed copy. The kit API is 2; a Special written
  against 1 still loads.
• A planetary recording measured through the connector stays measured for the
  next call. The measurement is saved beside the recording, and only the measure
  itself read it back, so the stack after it refused.
• look finds the picture the Season starts from, and the last try.
• A starter Line keeps its step ids from one call to the next, so season_edit
  accepts the id season_line just showed.

Stars

Combine stars is a new button beside Combine filters. It takes each
filter's stars off with a Remove stars preset and mixes them through a palette
meant for a star field: NB stars to RGB with or without sulphur, RGB, or LRGB.
The result is a picture of its own, with a Line to stretch and saturate it on,
and Add stars pointed at it puts them back. The Stars dropdown on Combine
filters is gone. It only did anything when every filter's Line had already
taken its stars off, and what it made never reached anywhere you could work on
it. A combination whose channels had their stars split off still makes their
stars, as before.

Add stars picked from its list put nothing back. A session of one picture
does not name its stars, so the screen labels them "Stars", and nothing in the
recipe answered to that word. Picking it bound the slot to a picture that did
not exist. Behind that sat a second bug: naming the stars made the step replay
every crop above the fork a second time. A mirror or a quarter turn keeps the
size, so the stars came back flipped, with a note saying it went well.

Presets keep the Auto toggle. Applying a preset turned Auto off; it now
puts back what the step was on when you saved it. Older presets read as off,
as they always did. A list that names something this machine lacks shows it as
"(not on this machine)" instead of writing its first entry back.

Projects and PixInsight

• PixInsight reads the XISF's solution the right way up. WCS keywords do
  not say which way their rows run, so PixInsight guesses, and it guessed right
  only when north pointed into the upper half of the frame. Otherwise the
  solution came out mirrored and SPCC could not match a star. The XISF now
  carries PixInsight's own astrometric solution beside the keywords. The
  rotation matches the one PixInsight reports, where a north-up frame used to
  read -179 degrees, and ordinary frames are no longer called mirrored.
• An unpacked project can be seasoned. Its pictures were filed as the Season's
  output, so the Season found no stack and said to cook first.
• Seasoning without naming a Line runs the ticket's own Line when it has one,
  the one a project was unpacked with or the last file run. It used to run the
  measured starter over your project's pictures.
• A packed project carries its seasoned picture as a thumbnail, is no longer
  titled after the first filter it was handed, and holds a preset once however
  many steps use it.
• Show in Explorer opens the project's folder when its path has a space in it.
  It opened Documents.
• Scale spread called the softest frame the best one, by ranking four metrics
  that are better small as if bigger were better.

Steps that did not match their own description

Writing each step's Menu page turned up behaviour that disagreed with what the
step said it did. Fixed:

• Crop's Auto measured before its quarter turns, and an angle with no box
  turned the picture the opposite way from a boxed one.
• Combine filters lined unequal sizes up by their corners, and gave its stars
  the gains before matching them away.
• Align channels moved each channel the opposite way from its numbers' names.
  A positive red shift down now moves red down, and Lines saved before come out
  the same as they did. The last column no longer stays behind on a shift down,
  and a new toggle trims the edge a shift uncovers.
• Glow thresholded each channel on its own and coloured its light.
• A Mask stopped applying below a Resample or a Crop without a word.
• Resample read four pixels in sixteen at a quarter.
• Star stretch's Auto left the hard default on stars already at one.
• Saturation's fade sat under a stretched sky.
• The masked Stretch landed the sky short while its note said it had arrived.
• Star cores met one channel's clip level with another channel's sky.
• Add stars refused mono stars on colour, said nothing when one half was still
  linear, and replayed crops in full-size pixels on a proxy.
• A proxy measured tiles, radii and star boxes at a different scale from the
  export.
• An outside tool that refused the float file ran again on sixteen bits, which
  divided a picture peaking past one by its peak and never gave it back. The
  picture is scaled back now, only a refusal is retried (a timeout that already
  cost half an hour is not), and the step shows a warning on its chip.
• The measured starter Line no longer includes Colour. A default cannot know
  what a picture's first step should be, so the Stretch page says to put Colour
  first when yours needs it.

Smaller things

• The Serve's earlier-nights card is gone. A session of several nights does
  that job now.
• HDR's "only part of the range" tick shows its three dials as soon as you
  tick it.
• Sharpen's warning names the step that did the stretching. On a star Line
  that is Star stretch, and the old warning sent you looking for a Stretch.
• Each picture keeps its place on the Line's strip when you visit a shorter
  one and come back.
• About thirty-five tooltips lost a paragraph justifying the control to
  someone who never asked. Seventeen strings named a program this app is not,
  and no longer do; the programs it drives keep their names. "Also export each
  channel on its own" is now "Export channels separately".

Once, after updating

• Thirteen steps changed version, so each Line recomputes them the first time
  it runs.
• Every saved planetary measurement is made once more. A file written before
  cannot say whether it covered the crop or the whole frame.
• Settings, under AI clients, names an installed skill older than the app's
  own; its button moves you to skill 2.
• Restart any AI client that was connected to the app.

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macOS: the app is not signed by Apple, so the first launch is
refused. One line clears it, and it is only ever needed once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DeAstroStacker.app

Windows: SmartScreen will warn for the same reason - More info,
then Run anyway.