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