Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.18

Announcement

• CAst has a Discord server. Join to follow updates and talk about the app: https://discord.gg/w5dxBQ5Fj

Black Hole

• Add a Simulations section on the mode picker with Black Hole mode: the full PhysicsEngine black hole lab (Kerr and Schwarzschild light, evolving GPU/CPU gas disk, every lab setting, flaring hot-particle glints with amount, brightness, size, variety, duration and whiteness controls, PNG export, and movie export with camera paths) with CAst's Milky Way as the lensed background, adjustable in brightness, contrast, saturation, black level and warmth, plus an optional lensed star overlay with random stars or real Hipparcos catalog stars at their true positions and colors.

Galaxy Merger

• Add Galaxy Merger mode under Simulations: the full PhysicsEngine galaxy merger lab (two disk galaxies with halos, bulges, cold and hot gas, and star formation integrated as an N-body run, with every lab parameter, resolution presets, run/stop/continue, playback, optical, volume, and particle pictures, camera compositions, optical looks, recordings, and PNG/MP4 export), plus an optional CAst Milky Way and star background (random or real Hipparcos catalog stars) that also appears in saved frames and exports.

Cluster Flow

• Add Cluster Flow mode under Simulations: the full PhysicsEngine Cosmic Flow lab (gas filaments in a galaxy cluster with dark halos, cooling and black-hole outbursts, or an expanding cosmological volume with live dark matter, with every lab setting, accuracy presets, camera motion and volume exploration, density/speed/temperature/compression views, .cflow bake and replay, and PNG/MP4 export); the live simulation pauses while you are in another mode.

macOS (unsigned alpha, Apple Silicon)

1. Download CitizenAstronomy-macos-arm64-unsigned.zip and unzip it.
2. Move Citizen Astronomy.app to Applications (optional).
3. The first time, right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again. On macOS 15 or newer, click Done, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

The Mac build is not signed or notarized and has no in-app updater. To update, download the new zip from the latest release.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.17

Differential Photometry

• Label comparison stars with AAVSO AUID (UID) when they match the VSP sequence, or with an APASS designation otherwise, instead of long Gaia source numbers.
• Ephemeris Light Curve pulls the latest 30 days of AAVSO data and draws a smooth curve you can zoom and drag, with upcoming cycles by epoch and the current epoch marked.

HR Diagram

• Add a Filter button between Advanced and Only Group for color/temperature, distance, luminosity, and stellar class. Stars missing the selected measurement are left out, and the Work Log lists the ranges and what was removed.

Sky Explorer

• Starless frames can still be explored from an existing WCS: a same-size FITS beside a PNG, JPEG, or TIFF is used automatically, and Explore or Mag Limit asks before plate-solving when the image has almost no stars.
• Read PixInsight 1.9 XISF plate solutions stored as AstrometricSolution properties, so a solved starless frame is used directly instead of being sent to Gaia or astrometry.net.
• Estimate magnitude limit queries Pan-STARRS (north) or DES DR1 (south, SkyMapper fallback) for stars fainter than Gaia’s ~21 mag cutoff, and the Work Log states it when a catalog cannot reach the requested final magnitude.
• Scientific and Advanced galaxy searches mark faint background galaxies from DES (south) or Pan-STARRS (north), not only the few brightest SIMBAD/HyperLEDA names.
• Create collage includes those faint survey galaxies (30″ default crop when size is missing), and double-click opens NED for the galaxies or the matching VizieR catalog for survey stars.
• Explore and Mag Limit faint-star search change to a clickable Terminate button as soon as the query starts, including while the catalog thread is still starting.
• A drawn ROI shows its plate-solved field of view at the top-left corner, with a Sky Explorer Visuals option to hide that label.
• Mag Limit faint-star search uses the drawn ROI, so a small rectangle is queried on its own instead of as the whole frame.
• Estimate Magnitude Limit separates Magnitude ladder and Automatic limit, with shared bright/faint/step controls, a live summary, and a ladder option to mark only sources detected in the image.

Observation Deck

• Right-click images or folders in the Library tree to Exclude from Statistics (for example duplicate copies) or Include in Statistics again; excluded files stay listed but dimmed, the choice survives rescans, and the files themselves are not changed.

App

• Add an AI Assistant (Tools > AI Assistant) that uses your own OpenAI-compatible, Claude, or Gemini API key (saved in the system credential store) to answer how-to questions from the CAst guides, read folders, headers, and WCS to report which images show objects such as globular clusters, switch modes, and build an Observation Deck while finding exact and same-exposure duplicate images to leave out, each action after you approve. It never changes, moves, or deletes your files, and it sends no image pixels.
• Redesign the mode picker into Detect & Measure and Explore, Visualize & Process rows that fill the window, with each mode's title and description under its preview image.

macOS (unsigned alpha, Apple Silicon)

1. Download CitizenAstronomy-macos-arm64-unsigned.zip and unzip it.
2. Move Citizen Astronomy.app to Applications (optional).
3. The first time, right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again. On macOS 15 or newer, click Done, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

The Mac build is not signed or notarized and has no in-app updater. To update, download the new zip from the latest release.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.16

Sky Atlas

• Slide the bottom menu in and out smoothly on hover instead of snapping into place.
• Add Treat black as alpha in Custom Sky Map so black and near-black pixels become transparent and the overlay blends into the sky.
• Restore continuous sky motion while time is running; stars and objects slide between sidereal updates instead of jumping.
• Accelerate stars with reliable GPU instancing and shader-side projection, restore Stellarium-like density with smoother cores and seamlessly fading radial halos, keep decluttered labels stable while dragging, make every visible catalog star identifiable with cursor-local picking, remove spikes and obsolete controls, retain bounded handling for huge catalogs, and report compatibility mode explicitly.
• Fix startup showing the Hipparcos loading screen when the last mode was Sky Atlas; the mode picker opens without loading Sky Atlas until that mode is selected.
• Add Barnard, Sharpless, RCW, and HASH PN catalogs in Sky Atlas Settings so you can plot known nebulae and check whether a target is already catalogued; HASH PN labels use usual names such as StDr-1.
• Selecting an object shows SIMBAD, ADS, and VizieR literature links, plus HASH for HASH PN objects.
• Search opens a centered window that scans every catalog, including hidden ones, and lists matches from most relevant to least with the object type first; the highlighted match stays readable on the dark panel, typing stays smooth, and the status line shows Searching… while catalogs are scanned.
• Draw object names, constellation names, and deep-sky circles on the GPU so zoomed-in HASH PN fields stay smooth and readable; dense catalogs still wait for a closer zoom and keep a cap on how many names appear.
• Fix the Sky Atlas footer so location, FOV, RA/Dec, and Alt/Az stay readable after GPU overlays.
• Restore the previous Milky Way background and remove the starless Gaia glow, with Low/Medium/High still mapping to 4k / 8k / 32k.
• Open on a 60° Orion field showing stars to magnitude 5, then fade in fainter catalog stars gradually as you zoom; all-sky views keep stars small, and already-visible stars brighten so magnitude steps stay even. Opening uses the existing Milky Way preview instead of stitching a 16k atlas or uploading 32k GPU tiles, and does not reload the deep Hipparcos/Gaia catalogs, so the atlas appears immediately.
• Star-catalog downloads run in the background with a cancellable progress bar that appears immediately; the current sky stays interactive and only refreshes when the catalog is ready. Gaia DR3 streams as one catalog file instead of hanging on hundreds of TAP cells. A finished download now keeps the new magnitude after restart; quitting mid-download still restores the last working limit.
• Smooth mouse-wheel zoom so the field of view glides continuously instead of jumping a step at a time.

Differential Photometry

• Target Field Animation: set the light-curve plot label size so title, axis labels, and ticks stay readable in the exported GIF or MP4.

Sky Explorer

• Add a Goto group between Display and Center Object: enter RA and Dec, then center the loaded survey on those coordinates.
• Add an ROI tool next to Text: click for an accent outline, drag a dashed green rectangle so Explore searches only that region, and click again to clear it. Shift+left-drag still works. ROI help rotates in the bottom status-bar tips, not as a hover popup on the image.
• Replace the native color dialog on Stroke, Fill, and Text with a themed picker; Fill includes a no-fill swatch so shapes can keep a visible stroke without a fill.
• Fix circle and ellipse drawing stuttering when catalog markers are on the image.
• Split Export into Image... (uploaded image plus annotations) and Survey... (survey plus annotations); Animation is unchanged.
• Fix Estimate magnitude limit markers: empty highlighted rings with a soft shade and no center dot, so the faintest stars stay visible.
• Fix Find actual magnitude limit on JPEG/PNG: reuse an existing Sky Explorer or ladder WCS, and load recovered SIP solves as 2D so the estimate does not crash.
• Improve Estimate magnitude limit: share start/increment/final magnitude for both modes, mark the faintest N stars, scale labels by magnitude, and center plus highlight a star selected in the results list.
• Show full Estimate magnitude limit star names on markers and in the results list instead of shortening them with “...”.

HR Diagram

• Fix JPEG and PNG uploads crashing while matching stars to Gaia; recovered plate-solve WCS is used so the educational HR features work on those images.

macOS (unsigned alpha, Apple Silicon)

1. Download CitizenAstronomy-macos-arm64-unsigned.zip and unzip it.
2. Move Citizen Astronomy.app to Applications (optional).
3. The first time, right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again. On macOS 15 or newer, click Done, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

The Mac build is not signed or notarized and has no in-app updater. To update, download the new zip from the latest release.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.15

Differential Photometry

• Automatic, Discover, and Scan Comps comparison stars are chosen per target by closest Gaia magnitude (then sky distance), so bright and faint targets no longer share one mid-range pool.
• Fix Overview showing more comparison stars than Source Results after Generate when per-frame ensembles differ; Overview now follows the same sticky comparison set.
• Restyle Scan Comps to match the Generate workflow: themed cards, step badges, denser Limits layout, Favourites Select All with a green ready badge, clickable pipeline steps, list starring, Overview-with-comps preview, and parallel combination light curves in a wider Combinations page.
• Fix Scan Comps Apply freezing the UI while combination workers shut down, and keep target switching responsive by caching catalog/comparison lookups and skipping a full measurement rescan on every Source Results click.
• Speed WCS recovery on wide fields: stop the losing Gaia/astrometry race for real, keep racing Gaia inside one cheap cone, and reuse one solve across same-night frames with similar pointing.
• Fold locks phase 0 to the VSX/literature period and epoch when those exist (so later nights can shift); without a literature period it still uses the calculated period and Anchor control, and the Work Log records which clock was used. AAVSO export stays a time-series JD file, not the folded view.
• Alpha testing: add an experimental O–C workstation next to Fold. Mark every local max/min in a session (or click one peak/trough) into a persistable log, plot an interactive themed O–C diagram once T₀ and P are set (prefilled from literature when available), show the extrema log full-width with all columns, include other loaded nights, import CAst/AAVSO/historic files, and pull live AID photometry by star name (auto-filled from an automatic scan, editable for manual photometry). Pull AAVSO remembers the last query for this app session, returns to the form if you decline a full-history download, and writes every filter step to the Work Log when nothing remains. AAVSO export stays a time-series JD file. Please try this and report issues.
• Saturation Filter skips only saturated frames, not the whole target; when the setting is off those frames stay on the light curve with a distinct orange × marker.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.14

Restore wide-field variable-star light curves (for example W UMa): catalogs use the actual image, not the 0.35° WCS sample cone; Gaia is tiled when the field is wider than one VizieR query. Clearing a folder cache also deletes leftover capped catalogs, and filename/OBJECT names still keep the target.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.13

Asteroid / Comet

• Fix asteroid/comet detection failing on valid SkyBoT results: namespaced IMCCE VOTables are parsed as XML, and a missing Astropy coordinate-frame file no longer makes the packaged app treat that XML as JSON.

App

• Recover missing WCS by running astrometry.net and local Gaia matching together and using the first success.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.12

Differential Photometry

• Date/Time light-curve x-axis is labeled Observation Time (UTC).
• Target Field Animation uses a large live 16:9 preview with Combined / Star Field / Light Curve inspection, a compact right-hand inspector, a readable panel-split slider, and a footer with the output summary plus Export Animation. Resizing the window keeps the preview aspect ratio, and the light-curve preview no longer flashes at the top-left when settings change.

Sky Explorer

• Image and Survey replace Open and Comparison: they sit together with accent styling, first click loads a file or survey, and later clicks can replace it or add a comparison. Survey list now includes DSS2, PanSTARRS, SDSS, 2MASS, WISE, GALEX, SHS, IPHAS, and NSNS DR0.2.
• Shift+left-drag draws an Explore ROI so catalog queries stay inside that rectangle; right-click the ROI to remove it.
• Explore becomes Terminate while a catalog query is running so you can abort it; the button returns to Explore or Update when the query finishes.

Asteroid / Comet

• Fix SkyBoT “unreadable responseâ€� failures: retry truncated HTTP 200 VOTables, and show parse error, QUERY_STATUS, and body preview in the Work Log and error dialog.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.11

Differential Photometry

• Add a compact frame dropdown between Display and Center so you can switch images without losing overlays; Auto Stretch keeps the original STF, the Info panel updates to that frame, and a loading popup appears while the next image is prepared.
• Add Blink between the frame selector and Center to flip through processed frames of the current series; Center Object is now labeled Center.
• Add Ephemeris to the left of Scan Comps: look up a variable by name (no image required), pull VSX period/epoch, and show upcoming maxima or minima in the Settings timezone; row color follows a day-to-night gradient, Tonight's Schedule is visible on open with the Moon in white (star curve appears after search), hovering the chart shows time plus Moon and target altitudes, Min/Max points are labeled on the curve, eclipsing stars (EA types such as Algol) show a VSX eclipse window that peaks at mid-eclipse and fades toward contact, the altitude axis stays 0–90°, events from the past two days stay in the list and on tonight's plot, and stars count as up from 5° (changeable in Settings → Setup).
• WCS sanity now uses an adaptive central probe (a fraction of the field, expanding only if needed), quality-selected unsaturated detections, and pixel/FWHM match limits so the check is independent of camera scale; photometry still queries a small Gaia/VSX cone instead of tiling the whole field.
• Target Field Animation: keep crop-then-align by default, with a slower align-then-crop option; set loop duration and output scale, and save GIF or MP4. MP4 can repeat the sequence a chosen number of times (total length is loops × loop duration). Optionally draw a target marker (None, or the Asteroid/Comet styles including Pointer) with length, thickness, and color, and a live preview to the left of the export options. The export window shows a theme-aware pipeline with a progress bar per step and green completion text. Aligning and cropping run in the background without holding every full camera frame in memory.

Observation Deck

• Add one or more master imaging folders (each add refreshes library stats), rescan to update the saved library. Observation Deck stays closed until that mode is selected, then restores the saved library in the background without scanning folders.
• Observation History is a spiral orbit (one turn per year): the center shows archive length and hover details, month hover follows the calendar angle, night color is integration per night, the outer ring is a smooth observing-pattern halo, and a year calendar opens from a year label or double-click.
• Archive dashboard: compact header KPIs with Library, Observation History, and Filter Usage aligned; Filter Usage uses a large donut beside a compact right-side legend when the panel is wide, and Targets takes the remaining height; filter colors follow the active theme.

Asteroid / Comet

• Add Pointer marker style: two lines from the top and left that stop short of the object so the target sits in empty space.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.10

Differential Photometry: Export → Target Field Animation: crop and align the selected target, correct clouds and transparency changes from the local stars visible in the crop, apply a shared stretch, and export the field beside its light curve.
HR Diagram: Cap the Gaia/VizieR field query (G ≤ 18) and tile wide crowded fields so VizieR no longer crashes with a raw parse error or returns only a truncated slice; Gaia magnitude, row cap, and tiling are adjustable in Settings → HR Diagram.
Asteroid / Comet: Before long WCS recovery, compare mount/header pointing with embedded WCS, log the choice, prefer astrometry.net when a key is set or the two disagree, and keep Gaia tiling from using broken stub WCS.
App: Settings: keep Save/Cancel visible by capping the dialog to about 90% of the screen and scrolling tall tabs.
App: Local Gaia WCS recovery: cap catalog rows and retry dense-field VizieR failures with brighter magnitude cuts, then a smaller search radius; demote saturated/near-ceiling peaks and spatially thin match stars so local solves work without an API key.
App: Settings → General: Astrometry Timeout (seconds) next to the API key; default remains 300s.

Citizen Astronomy 0.1.1-alpha.9

Differential Photometry

• Folder WCS sanity: detection→Gaia scoring with skip-brightest, coherent-shift subtraction, and soft-accept for stable moderate matches; all tunables are in Settings → Advanced so good embedded WCS (e.g. W UMa) is accepted while bad CRVAL/CCVALS cases still repair or re-solve.
• Scan Comps replaces Find Better Fit: build a mag/color/distance candidate pool, favourite comps, browse combination light curves, and apply a chosen set to refresh the differential curve and sticky Source Results comps (favourite checkboxes now stick correctly).

Sky Explorer

• Restore Display stretch None and apply it automatically for already-stretched uploads (e.g. 8-bit TIFF/JPEG finals) instead of re-running STF.
• Fix Explore SIMBAD queries for modern astroquery (use ra/dec instead of legacy ra(d)/dec(d) that now raise).
• Object-type stroke, fill, and text colors stay independent when edited; Advanced/Scientific pickers now open on the displayed color. Default category hues were retuned (nebulae amber/gold so they contrast with H-alpha).
• Auto/Manual is a mode switch (fixed width, same as Export): Manual keeps catalog overlays, lets you add marks, and right-click Delete removes unwanted automatic annotations from the image or Source Results. After drawing a mark, property edits update that last mark until you switch tools; selecting a mark again applies further edits to it. Text annotations include opacity.
• Settings → Visuals: set a default label font, style (Regular/Bold/Italic/Bold Italic), and size for all object-type categories; per-type Text edits still override.
• Object-type stroke, fill, and text edits update the image overlay immediately (no unselect/reselect).
• Catalog object-type mode: pick NGC, IC, LDN, VdB, LBN, Messier, Barnard, Sharpless, or HASH PN and show only those objects, labeled with catalog names, in a light white–yellow–orange palette. HASH PN uses usual names (not HASH numbers). Cluster members and paper IDs such as IC 5146 1 or [RAB2011] IC1 are not treated as Index Catalogue objects.
• Settings → Visuals: Stroke Outline color and width for the dark halo around marker strokes; set width to 0 to turn it off.
• Export Image saves the annotated field at the original image resolution (not a window screenshot), with label and stroke sizes matched to the on-screen view; JPEG uses high quality.

App

• Settings: move WCS sanity, shared workers, and Increase SNR from General into a new Advanced tab so the dialog fits on screen.
• Saving Settings applies the changes and stays in the current mode instead of returning to the Mode Selection window.
• Open camera RAW (DNG, CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF, RW2, RAF, PEF, and related LibRaw types) anywhere JPEG is already accepted; Differential Photometry still skips RAW/JPG/PNG as unsuitable.
• Unsigned macOS alpha: pack a Drive-ready build kit on Windows (packaging/pack_macos_build_kit.ps1), build Citizen Astronomy.app on a Mac (packaging/build_macos_unsigned.sh); bundle Astropy/NumPy/photutils/PyVO metadata and use an early runtime fallback for missing optional Astropy/PyVO data files at startup (resolve local SIMBAD criteria JSON; do not stub it empty); first launch via right-click → Open; no Velopack in-app updates on Mac yet.
• Update Available window is wider and shows a scrollable What's new list so longer release notes stay readable.