AstroCounter v1.3.0 - Portable

🌌 AstroCounter v1.3.0 — 3D Celestial Sphere, Multi-Panel Mosaic Engine, Format-Aware AI Fusion & Modern Floating UI

AstroCounter v1.3.0 is a major release introducing an interactive 3D Celestial Sphere Planetarium Dome, multi-panel astrometric mosaic stitching, format-aware per-photo Auto-Confidence, simultaneous multi-photo 2D/3D light grading, 360° × 180° equirectangular panoramic exporting, and a completely redesigned minimalist workspace with draggable floating windows.

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✨ What's New in v1.3.0

🖥️ Modern Minimalist UI & Movable Floating Windows

• Draggable In-App Floating Panels: All tool drawers—View & Layers (🏷️), Display & Light (☀️), Auto-Confidence (⚡), Mosaic & Photo Manager (🖼️), Advanced Export (🚀), and User Guide & Help Center (❓)—are movable floating windows that can be dragged anywhere inside the viewport.
• Multi-Photo Selection & Clean Borderless Rendering:
  • Select multiple photos simultaneously via the Photos (🖼️) drawer, the ☑ All button, or by holding Ctrl / Shift while double-clicking photos on the 2D or 3D canvas.
  • Unselected photos render cleanly with no outline border; only actively selected photos display a cyan selection highlight.
  • Double-clicking empty space in either 2D or 3D immediately clears all selections.
• Drag-and-Drop Layer Ordering: Reorder overlapping mosaic panels by dragging and dropping photo cards inside the Photos drawer, paired with cosine S-curve feathered alpha blending.
• Real-Time Multi-Stage Backend Telemetry: Detailed live status updates in the footer report exact background operations stage by stage ([Stage 1/3 - Astrometry], [Stage 2/3 - Mosaic Alignment], [Stage 3/3 - Full-Resolution Star Counting]).
• Built-In Help Center (❓ Help / F1): Added an interactive, draggable User Guide & Help Center covering all workflows and shortcuts in English and Turkish.

🧠 Hybrid AI Fusion (DirectML + Photometry) & SDSS-Trained YOLO11n ONNX

• Toolbar Engine Selector & AI Badge: Switch seamlessly between Hybrid Fusion, Photometry, and DirectML detection engines alongside the 🧠 AI Model: YOLO11n ONNX badge.
• SDSS DR16 Fine-Tuned Model: Updated models/astro_yolo11n.onnx trained on real Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR16 SkyServer) astronomical cutouts across stars, galaxies, nebulae, and transient/satellite trail artifacts.
• Format-Aware Per-Photo Auto-Confidence: Automatically computes optimal background noise knee-point thresholds per photo—applying stricter filtering on lossy formats (.jpg/.jpeg) to suppress compression artifacts while preserving faint 2σ–3σ structures on lossless formats (.tiff, .fits, .png). Includes individual per-photo confidence sliders.

☀️ Simultaneous 2D/3D Display & Light Grading + 2D Infinite Canvas

• 2D & 3D Multi-Photo Light Synchronization: Real-time Opacity, Brightness, Exposure (Gamma), Contrast, and Auto Exposure & Color Balance (MTF) adjustments work in both the 2D View and 3D Celestial Dome, applying simultaneously to all currently selected photos (or all loaded photos when none are selected).
• Unconstrained 2D Infinite Panning: Pan freely in any direction beyond photograph edges on the 2D sky canvas without hitting scroll boundaries, with smooth cursor-centered zooming (5% – 2000%).
• 2D Region-of-Interest (ROI) Masking: Draw rectangular or polygonal Include (Scan only) and Exclude regions directly on the 2D canvas.

🌐 3D Celestial Sphere, Multi-Panel Mosaic Bridging & 2-Way Stellarium Sync

• 3D Celestial Dome & Multi-Tile Mosaic Alignment: Projects single frames and multi-panel mosaics onto a unified gnomonic tangent plane in 2D and a 360° interactive celestial sphere in 3D. Bridges adjacent panels via pairwise star-correspondence homography and deduplicates 100,000+ stars in spherical sky coordinates (RA/Dec).
• 2-Way Live Stellarium Synchronization (2D & 3D): Full bidirectional camera tracking between AstroCounter and Stellarium across both the 2D View and the 3D Celestial Dome, with zero drift.
• 2D Mosaic & 360° Panoramic Export: Export either the 2D Canvas / Mosaic or a full 360° × 180° Equirectangular Panoramic Sky Map (1x or 2x Super-Res 4K) in PNG, Lossless TIFF, JPG, CSV, or JSON formats.

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📦 Portable Release (No Installation Required)

1. Download and extract AstroCounter-v1.3.0-Portable.zip.
2. Launch AstroCounter.UI.exe directly on Windows 10/11 (x64).
3. Self-contained build — no separate .NET runtime, Python, or CUDA installation is required.

What's Changed

• Release v1.1.2: Photometric calibration, in-frame catalog detection, … by @ghostkronos in #1
• V1.3.0 by @ghostkronos in #6

New Contributors

• @ghostkronos made their first contribution in #1

Full Changelog: v.1.1.2...v1.3.0

AstroCounter v1.1.2 - Portable

AstroCounter v1.1.2

AstroCounter v1.1.2 delivers major improvements to photometric star detection accuracy, astronomical plate solving, in-frame catalog scanning, and seamless two-way Stellarium synchronization, alongside bilingual support and zero-dependency portable deployment.

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Highlights & Key Improvements

1. Robust Photometric Star Extraction & Noise Modeling

• Asymmetric Background Noise Estimator: Replaced full-window standard deviation with an uncontaminated sub-median and interquartile range (IQR: $1.4826 \times (P_{50} - P_{25})$) estimator across a 2D spatial mesh. Bright and saturated stellar cores ($netPeak \ge 235$) no longer artificially inflate local sky noise.
• Calibrated SNR & Bright Star Confidence: Tier 1 High confidence ($\ge 80%$, Green) is now strictly guaranteed for saturated and high-SNR stars ($SNR \ge 10\sigma$ or $netPeak \ge 90$) using an integrated metric:
  $$\text{Confidence} = \text{clamp}\left(0.80 + 0.10 \times \text{SNR}{\text{score}} + 0.10 \times \text{Peak}{\text{score}}, 0.80, 1.0\right)$$
• Sub-Pixel Flux-Weighted Centroiding: Added adaptive flux-weighted centroid refinement for saturated cores, centering bounding boxes precisely on true stellar centers.
• False Galaxy Classification Elimination: Saturated stars with prominent Point Spread Functions (PSFs) are no longer misclassified as diffuse galaxies.
• ONNX/YOLO Core Calibration: Added brightness-based confidence calibration for ONNX inference to prevent deep learning detectors from downranking saturated star centers.

2. Blind Geometric Plate Solving & In-Frame Deep-Sky Catalog

• Integral-Image Star Extraction: Rapidly isolates star centroids while subtracting nebulosity gradients and irregular panorama boundaries.
• RANSAC Triangle Invariant Matching: Performs scale- and rotation-invariant triangle matching against an embedded J2000 celestial catalog to calculate exact gnomonic tangent-plane World Coordinate System (WCS) parameters (RA, Dec, pixel scale, field rotation).
• Targeted In-Frame Filtering: Replaced the legacy manual fetch button with an automated in-frame catalog filter. Once plate solving succeeds, the catalog dropdown is dynamically populated exclusively with celestial objects (Messier, NGC, IC) physically located inside the photograph's field of view.
• Clean Coordinate Tracking: Eliminated UI text overlap when target objects fall outside the frame; only verified in-frame objects are selectable.

3. Real-Time 1:1 Stellarium Bidirectional Sync

• Automated Windowed Launcher: AstroCounter launches Stellarium automatically in windowed mode (-f no) with HTTP Remote Control enabled on port 8090 without permanently modifying local configuration files.
• Bidirectional Viewport Locking: Panning or zooming inside AstroCounter instantly moves Stellarium, and panning/zooming in Stellarium synchronizes AstroCounter's viewport, scale, and spherical rotation in real time.
• Equatorial Grid Projection: Renders curved Right Ascension and Declination grid lines onto the image canvas with a continuous $0^\circ\text{--}360^\circ$ orientation slider.

4. Radiometric Normalization & Scientific Formats

• Midtone Transfer Function (MTF) Auto-Exposure: Automatically enhances severely underexposed linear stacks without blowing out stellar highlights.
• Bilinear Sky-Glow Pedestal Subtraction: Automatically neutralizes light pollution pedestals.
• Scientific Format Support: Native decoding for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit floating-point TIFF stacks (striped and tiled) alongside PNG, JPEG, and BMP.

5. User Interface & Internationalization

• Bilingual Interface: English is enabled as the default language, with automatic system language detection (Turkish / English) and a dedicated one-click language toggle on the header bar.
• Streamlined Workflow: Legacy buttons and non-functional controls have been removed in favor of a clean, unified toolbar.

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Verification & Test Suite

• All 37 automated unit tests passed (AstroCounter.Tests targeting .NET 10.0), including synthetic bright vs. faint star photometric calibration tests and WCS transformation verifications.

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Assets

• AstroCounter-v1.1.2-Portable.zip (Self-contained Windows x64 executable; no .NET, Python, or CUDA installation required).

AstroCounter v1.0.0 - Taşınabilir Sürüm (Portable)

Kurulum gerektirmez! Zip dosyasını indirip bir klasöre çıkartın ve AstroCounter.UI.exe dosyasına çift tıklayarak çalıştırın.