v0.6.10

Explorer integration — much faster folder browsing

Browsing folders of camera RAW (NEF/CR2/…) or FITS in Explorer, with an astro
column shown (focal length, exposure, dimensions…), is dramatically smoother.

• No more scroll stutter — the property handler now reads only the small metadata header it needs (a couple of MB for a RAW's EXIF) instead of up to 32 MB per file, so scrolling a folder of RAWs no longer freezes.
• Instant on revisit — the parsed metadata is cached, so leaving a folder and coming back (or adding a column) fills the columns immediately instead of re-reading every file.

Measurement columns (HFR/stars/stats) are unchanged — they're filled from the cache the viewer populates when you open a file.

Verified against a folder of ~200 NEFs. No behaviour change to measurements or rendering.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.10.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.9...v0.6.10

v0.6.9

Security

• Hardened DLL loading for the Explorer integration — the shell extension now loads its bundled libraries (FITS, RAW, XISF, database) strictly from its own install folder, so a malicious library planted next to a file (or on the system PATH) can't be loaded into Explorer.

No user-visible behaviour change; thumbnails, previews and property columns work exactly as before.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.9.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.8...v0.6.9

v0.6.8

Maintenance & hardening

No behaviour changes — a shutdown-leak fix and a dev-tooling security fix.

• No leaked work on exit — results computed by the background workers that were still in flight when the app closed are now freed instead of leaked.
• Safer dev registration — the local register.ps1 now installs the shell extension into %ProgramFiles%\WinStellar (admin-only) instead of a user-writable folder, closing a DLL-hijack vector; unregister.ps1 also cleans up the old location.

Measurements and rendering are identical to v0.6.7.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.8.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.7...v0.6.8

v0.6.7

Maintenance & polish

Internal cleanup with a small interactive-smoothness win — no behaviour changes.

• Smoother stretch with the Aberration inspector open — in Visuel mode the 100 % crop tiles are now refreshed in place while you drag the stretch sliders, instead of being torn down and rebuilt every frame.
• Less duplicated window code — the three inspection popups (Tilt / Aberration / Background) now share their dark-title-bar and Direct2D setup, reducing drift.

Measurements and rendering are identical to v0.6.6.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.7.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.6...v0.6.7

v0.6.6

Performance

Loading and the inspection tools are snappier — the UI never waits on analysis.

• The image appears immediately on open — star detection no longer blocks the frame. On a large uncached file the picture shows as soon as it's rendered, and the analysis panel fills in a moment later. Spamming Next/Previous stays fluid: frames you skip past aren't analysed.
• Inspection panels run in parallel — the per-star analysis, PSF plate and background map now compute on a second background thread, so opening several inspectors at once (or one while re-stretching) no longer makes them wait on each other or on navigation.

Measurements (star counts, HFR, background metrics, rendering) are unchanged from v0.6.5.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.6.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.5...v0.6.6

v0.6.5

Performance & robustness

The inspection tools no longer freeze the window while they compute.

• No more UI freeze on the Aberration & Background inspectors — the PSF plate (star detection + moments) and the background/illumination map now compute on a background thread instead of blocking the UI. Opening them on a large frame, changing the grid, or stepping through files stays fully responsive; the result appears when it's ready.
• Instant rotation carries over from v0.6.4 — rotating with an inspector open re-projects the cached result with no recompute.
• Sturdier against bad files — added a robustness test suite (malformed / truncated / garbage inputs must fail cleanly, never crash the Explorer thumbnail/preview handlers).
• Verifiable downloads — each release now ships a SHA256SUMS.txt so you can check the installer's integrity (sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt).

Measurements (star counts, HFR, background metrics, rendering) are unchanged from v0.6.4.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.5.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed). You can verify the download against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full Changelog: v0.6.4...v0.6.5

v0.6.4

Performance & maintenance

Another speed/robustness pass — no behaviour changes.

• Instant rotation in the inspectors — rotating the image with the Aberration (Inspected) or Tilt window open no longer re-runs the full star analysis; the cached result is just re-projected, so it follows the image with no freeze.
• Lower memory / less allocation in star detection and the PSF plate.
• Hardening: the camera-RAW decoder now caps its unpack memory, so a malformed/decompression-bomb RAW can't exhaust memory while Explorer generates a thumbnail.
• Internal: consolidated the shared median/MAD/quantile and grid-rotation helpers into single sources of truth (with a new round-trip test), reducing drift.

Every output (star counts, HFR, rendering) is byte-for-byte identical to v0.6.3.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.4.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed).

Full Changelog: v0.6.3...v0.6.4

v0.6.3

Performance & memory

A performance-focused release — no behaviour changes, just faster and lighter.

• Faster RAW thumbnails — camera-RAW folders (NEF / CR2 / …) generate thumbnails ~1.8× faster and use a quarter of the memory (half-resolution decode, invisible at thumbnail size).
• Snappier inspection overlays — star markers / tilt / aberration now reuse the analysis already computed when the frame loads, instead of re-scanning the whole image a second time.
• Lower memory at load — the FITS loader no longer holds duplicate copies of each colour plane; big drop in peak RAM on large OSC frames.
• Under the hood — hoisted redundant work out of the star-detection and PSF-plate hot loops.

Every output (star counts, HFR, rendering) is byte-for-byte identical to v0.6.2 — this is pure speed/memory.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.3.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed).

Full Changelog: v0.6.2...v0.6.3

v0.6.2

Reliability & hardening

A maintenance release focused on robustness — mostly under-the-hood fixes to how WinStellar parses files, which matters because the thumbnail / preview / column handlers run in-process inside Windows Explorer.

• No more Explorer crashes on bad files — malformed, truncated or hostile FITS / XISF / RAW files are now handled gracefully instead of taking down the Explorer window.
• Metadata columns for large FITS — Object, Exposure, dimensions and the other columns now populate for FITS frames larger than 32 MB (common on modern high-resolution CMOS sensors). HFR / Stars stay instant for frames up to 32 MB.
• Large files open — FITS / XISF ≥ 2 GB (stacked masters, big mosaics) no longer fail to open.
• Under the hood — hardened image-dimension and integer-overflow checks in the loaders, a stronger analysis-cache key, a fix for unbounded SQLite WAL growth, and a shell-extension lifetime fix.
• Project hygiene — added a security policy (SECURITY.md), Dependabot, and least-privilege / SHA-pinned CI.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.2.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed).

Full Changelog: v0.6.1...v0.6.2

v0.6.1

Maintenance

Internal cleanup of the v0.6.0 inspection tools — no functional changes.

Install: download WinStellarSetup-0.6.1.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (the installer is not yet code-signed).

Full Changelog: v0.6.0...v0.6.1

Full Changelog: v0.6.0...v0.6.1