v0.5.0 — Planetary Post-Processing, Edit Image, Live Capture

Highlights

• Native Planetary/Lunar Post-Processing ("Post-Process…" on any .ser capture) — quality-scoring & registration, median/mean stacking, à trous wavelet sharpening, RGB channel alignment, and auto-stretch, all in-app, with GPU-accelerated debayering, background cancellable processing with real progress, and an optional GraXpert pass without leaving the modal.
• Edit Image — a GPU-backed (Core Image) single-image editor on any FITS/PNG/TIFF capture: color/contrast/curves/sharpen/rotate/crop, denoise, a hot-pixel clean-up filter, three astronomy-specific tools (green-cast/SCNR removal, star-size reduction, shadow/highlight recovery), a one-tap Magic Wand auto-fix, per-parameter reset, and a zoom/pan control for checking results at real pixel scale.
• Live Capture — an iPhone-Live-Photo-style workflow: buffer a few seconds of the live feed, scrub through every frame it captured, export whichever one actually looked sharpest.
• Observation Timeline rework — spacing is now purely count-based rather than proportional to real elapsed time (no more dead space after a quiet week), a big date header tracks whatever's scrolled into view, thumbnails below 25pt of spacing hide on a stride to stay legible, and jump-to-most-recent/zoom no longer land in the wrong place.
• Several real UI freezes fixed: exporting an image, capturing a dark/flat calibration frame, and rapid Capture ROI changes could each lock up or corrupt the live preview — see Fixed below.

Added

• Native Planetary/Lunar Post-Processing pipeline for .ser captures, with optional GraXpert integration.
• "Edit Image…" on any single FITS/PNG/TIFF capture, with per-parameter reset, denoise, hot-pixel clean-up, and three astronomy tools (green-cast removal, star-size reduction, shadow/highlight recovery), plus zoom/pan.
• "Live Capture" burst + best-frame picker.
• An always-visible "PNG" export button next to the RAW8/RAW16 picker.
• A plain-English focus-quality readout ("Focus: Good/Fair/Poor") with manual-adjustment guidance.
• A multi-select "Browse Files…" modal for files an external tool left in a session's folder, with a live preview and bulk Delete/Show in Finder.
• A big date header on the Observation Timeline, and count-based (not time-based) spacing with a hide-below-25pt/reveal-on-zoom rule for crowded runs.
• Optional Siril integration, GitHub community health files, capture flash/shutter feedback, per-project/session/capture disk usage, and more — see CHANGELOG.md for the complete list.

Fixed

• Exporting an image (PNG/TIFF/FITS) froze the app and spun the pointer — the file encode now runs off the main actor.
• Capturing a dark/flat calibration frame left the live preview frozen — it now resumes automatically.
• Rapid Capture ROI changes could tear/flash the live preview — the controls now disable themselves while a restart is in flight.
• The Observation Timeline's "jump to most recent" button and its zoom in/out could scroll to the wrong spot.
• Planetary Post-Processing: no restack progress, a black preview during restack, cancel not actually stopping the CPU, unsharpened "foggy" defaults, and an unresponsive stretch slider — all fixed.

Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md#0.5.0

Installing

Download either the .dmg or .zip below, then run the bundled Fix Gatekeeper Warning.command once (moves the app to /Applications, clears the quarantine flag, resets the Camera permission) — Skyformac isn't notarized yet, so macOS Gatekeeper will otherwise warn on first launch. See docs/distribution.md.

v0.4.0

Added

• Astronomy Knowledge (Settings) — a user-editable folder of plain .md
  reference files (Messier/bright-object seasons, planet/Moon visibility
  mechanics) folded into every AI panel request, grounding a small local
  model (qwen3:8b and similar) in real astronomy facts instead of guessed
  ones. Add/edit/delete files directly in Finder; Restore Default
  Content resets just the shipped defaults, leaving anything else added
  untouched.
• The AI panel now includes the current date/time and observer location
  (session's, else project's, else the last GPS fix) in every request, and
  the Caldwell catalog (109 objects, Patrick Moore's "beyond Messier"
  complement) alongside Messier in the bundled sky catalog — used by the
  Atlas view, SkyAtlasLookup, and the Filters popover's object list.
• A Stop button next to the AI panel's "Thinking…" indicator cancels an
  in-flight request; replies now render as Markdown instead of literal
  **asterisks**; AI planning/chat failures are logged to the Application
  Log, not just shown inline.
• Multi-session AI chat history — create a new conversation, browse/
  rename/delete past ones, and resume exactly where one left off; each is
  persisted as its own file (same "one file per item" shape as Equipment).
• Streaming AI responses — replies (including "Ask AI to Describe…")
  now stream in live instead of a bare "Asking Ollama…" spinner for the
  whole wait, and a configurable Max Response Length (Settings) bounds
  how long a single reply may generate.
• Camera Settings on the Capture detail page — every field of that
  specific capture's own settings snapshot (mode, gain, exposure, ROI,
  drift reduction, Smart Live Stack, Lucky Imaging burst count, SER
  duration), previously recorded but never shown anywhere.
• Previous/Next Capture buttons directly overlaid on the capture image
  itself, and Open Previous Session (only "Open Next Session" existed
  before) in the Project menu.
• Open/Open in Viewer buttons on the Capture detail page for SER/
  recording/other non-image captures — FITS reuses the app's own real
  viewer, everything else opens in whatever the system already handles it
  with.
• Zoom (like the Histogram) and manual entry on the Gain and Exposure
  sliders, for dialing in an exact value directly instead of only dragging.
• Move a session to a different project, and Next/Previous
  navigation on the Project, Session, and Capture pages.
• A zoomable, project-wide Activity Timeline chart, and real session
  times (not just a bare date) on session cards.
• The camera view's toolbar now shows the running session's planned
  objects, so "what am I supposed to be pointing at" doesn't require a
  trip back to the session page.
• Captures now auto-save directly into the active session's own folder
  — no folder-choice dialog — named <object>-<date>-<time> (e.g.
  M13-2026-08-15-213045.fits); the app already organizes captures by
  project/session, so asking again was a redundant step. Falls back to the
  old save panel only when no session is active to organize into.
• Developer ID + notarization distribution set up (make release,
  docs/distribution.md, a Homebrew Cask template) — Skyformac ships as a
  signed .dmg via GitHub Releases, not through the Mac App Store; see
  docs/app-store-readiness.md for why that path isn't being pursued.
• README: a development-status notice, a Screenshots gallery of the
  app itself, and links to the project's website
  and docs/distribution.md.
• Credited Stellarium for the bundled Messier/
  Caldwell/bright-star catalog data (GPLv2) in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Changed

• Removed "Ideas for Next Time" (the bare-object-name suggestion list) from
  the Dashboard and Insights pages — the AI panel chat is the intended
  place to ask what to look at next, and the Dashboard's own "Suggested
  Session" card already covers the same ground with a fuller answer.
• Reduced the Projects browser/Dashboard's minimum width so the whole
  window (browser + AI sidebar) can no longer be forced wider than a
  1024pt-wide screen — on a smaller display this previously pushed the
  Settings toolbar button and the rightmost "Common Tasks" tile out of
  reach entirely, not just visually cramped (caught via two CI-only UI
  test failures that never reproduced locally, tracked down by downloading
  and inspecting the actual .xcresult from a failed run).
• The AI panel's Minimize/Detach/Close/Dock header buttons are icon-only now
  (a tooltip on hover), instead of showing text labels alongside the icons.
• Reduced Focus Assist/Planetary Tracking/Streak Detection's per-frame
  analysis cadence and the diagnostics poll interval as a modest, easily
  reverted energy tweak.
• Internal refactoring, from a full-codebase audit for dead code,
  duplication, and performance: the Gain/Exposure zoom+manual-entry
  scaffolding collapsed into one shared generic component; a cached
  thumbnail loader replacing four separate uncached NSImage(contentsOf:)
  call sites; a shared root-directory-resolution helper across the
  Projects/Equipment/AI-Chat/Knowledge-Base file stores; several
  CameraManager helpers deduped (blocking-capture preamble, control-cap
  lookup); StatsGridView switched from a Table (whose manually-guessed
  height could clip a section with enough rows) to a self-sizing Grid.

Fixed

• The AI panel failing to reopen as a detached window if closed while still
  in camera mode.
• Live GPU/CPU image enhancement (denoise, wavelet sharpening, Live GPU
  Controls) applying to the next captured frame instead of the one
  currently on screen when a setting changed.
• Live Stack's display stretch never re-adapting as the accumulated stack's
  own signal-to-noise improved, so it didn't visibly brighten.
• AcquisitionMode mislabeling a plain single exposure (neither Live Stack
  nor a Lucky Imaging burst) as "Lucky Imaging" in history/Insights.
• A GPU scratch-texture allocation failure could silently skip the final
  render stage, freezing the live preview with no error shown.
• The Camera Error alert's dismiss button was a no-op — a dismissed error
  could silently reappear on the next unrelated re-render.
• "Move to Project…" swallowing a failed move and navigating away as if it
  had succeeded; ProjectStore's delete/move helpers could otherwise leave
  a session's on-disk files orphaned or a CaptureRecord pointing at a
  file that no longer existed.
• Unplugging a camera or losing a webcam mid-recording didn't stop/finalize
  an in-progress SER/FITS recording, risking a corrupted file on reconnect.
• Any camera streaming error other than "removed" silently froze live view
  with no error shown and no way to resume without a full reconnect.
• AI-created projects/sessions (and Quick Start) reported success even when
  the underlying disk write actually failed.
• A previously-latent bug in the shared Xcode scheme (buildForArchiving
  left on for the test targets) that made every xcodebuild archive
  attempt fail outright — found while setting up the release process.

v0.3.0

Added

• Observation Projects — a whole new feature area, built up over many steps:
  • Project/session data model with one-folder-per-project/session filesystem
    persistence (plain JSON, no database).
  • The Projects browser itself: initially a three-column iMovie-style library,
    later replaced with a full-width drill-down page stack (Home → Projects →
    Project → Session), and finally topped with a proper orientation
    Dashboard as Home — resume the last session, common-task shortcuts,
    recent projects, highlighted sessions, an activity chart, and suggestions —
    with the original project grid/table moving one level down as its own
    Projects page.
  • GPS or hand-entered location on both projects and sessions.
  • Free-text + date-range search, later extended with a Filters popover
    (exact tag, observed object, equipment system, date range).
  • Ollama-backed AI session/project planning ("Ask AI to Plan…"), with a
    generous timeout and a qwen3:8b model preference (falling back to
    whatever's actually installed).
  • Quick Start — pick a common target and skip creating a project/session
    by hand; a consolidated Project menu; a project/session breadcrumb in
    the camera view.
  • Session cards, richer session history, and per-kind capture-count stats on
    both the Project and Session pages (later upgraded to a real resizable
    Table, replacing a capped-width grid).
  • Equipment management — named systems (camera/mount/optical tube plus
    optional tracking/imaging/autoguiding/power/eyepiece/smartphone-mount/other
    categories), a curated common-brand catalog, custom items, and
    project/session association with inheritance.
  • Plain-English capture notes ("Captured Saturn in Live Stack as FITS")
    generated automatically for every capture, shown on the timeline.
  • Per-capture action records — every capture now also snapshots the
    object observed, effective location, effective equipment system, and every
    acquisition parameter (gain/exposure/ROI/mode) in effect at that moment.
  • Recall Parameters — reapply a past action's exact camera settings to
    speed up setting up a similar shot again.
  • New Session Like This… — duplicate a session's goal/objects/location/
    equipment into a fresh session, without its captures.
  • Insights page — most-captured objects, most-used equipment, most
    common acquisition mode, a monthly activity chart, and "try this next"
    suggestions, aggregated across every project.
  • Archive projects/sessions, and delete with a 30-day grace period
    (Recently Deleted page, restore or purge immediately).
  • Multi-session AI project planning — "the nicest Messier objects visible
    in August" becomes one session per object in a single plan; the AI asks a
    single clarifying question first if it genuinely needs one (an unclear
    date range, an ambiguous location) instead of guessing.
  • Ask AI to Describe… — a grounded, editable plain-English description
    for a project or session, applied as either its goal (Set as Aim) or a
    dated note (Add as Note).
  • AI panel (renamed from "Assistant") — a chat panel on the right of
    every page, grounded in the current project/session, the connected
    camera, an Insights snapshot, and (new) your own ratings/favorites/top-
    rated past actions. Can propose creating a project/session or changing
    camera settings, always behind an Approve/Reject card. Resizable sidebar
    width, a multi-line compose field, a model picker (also in Settings) that
    lists whatever's actually installed on the configured Ollama server, and
    an editable server URL. Forced detached (never embedded) while a camera
    session is running, returning to the sidebar automatically once you're
    back to browsing if that's where it was before.
  • Ratings (1-5 stars) and favorites for projects, sessions, and
    individual captures — favorites sort to the top of their lists.
  • Equipment systems now persist as files (one JSON file per system,
    under a configurable Equipment folder in Settings) instead of
    UserDefaults, migrating any existing systems automatically the first
    time.
  • "Ideas for Next Time" is AI-computed when Ollama is reachable, falling
    back to the existing catalog-derived list otherwise — never an empty
    state either way.
  • A configurable AI "skill" for suggesting a full next session (name,
    goal, objects, and project — not just an object), shown as a "Suggested
    Session" card on the Dashboard; the standing instructions behind it are
    editable in Settings without touching a prompt in code.
  • Atlas view — a third Projects-page view alongside the thumbnail grid
    and table: every session across every project plotted by its target's
    real sky position (the app's own bundled Messier/bright-star catalog),
    filterable by project/object/date range, with tap-to-open navigation.
  • Save As Project…/Load Project… (File menu) — package/unpack a
    whole project folder (metadata, sessions, captures) as one .zip, for
    sharing a project across users/machines; an imported project always gets
    a fresh identity so it can never collide with one already in the library.
  • "Show All Projects" (Project menu) and a dedicated Equipment menu
    (View/Add New…) in the menu bar.
  • Bulk select on the Projects page (Archive/Delete over a whole selection).
  • Ollama connectivity diagnostics in Settings (Test Connection — checks
    both reachability and which models are actually installed, reporting
    exactly which one would be used).
• Acquisition Wizard — pick a target (planet, Moon, or curated deep-sky
  object), get its recommended gain/exposure/mode, and save/load setups as
  reusable presets.
• Smart Live Stack — live, self-curating deep-sky/planetary stacking that
  discards frames below a rolling sharpness threshold.
• Mesh Drift Correction (Experimental) in the Acquisition Wizard, with a
  triangulated interpolation and a live overlay of each vertex's search window.
• Per-channel (Red/Green/Blue) histogram and an independent Curves tab,
  in a detachable panel.
• ZWO gain/offset presets, a live dropped-frame counter, and ST4 pulse
  guiding.
• Exported-files viewer, GPU streak masking, an RGB24 processing pipeline
  (for iPhone/webcam sources), drift reduction, SER video recording, and
  planetary presets, later given telescope-specific exposure scaling.
• A "Running" status list next to the camera view for active pipelines.
• In-app Application Log (skyformac → Show Log…, ⌘⇧D) — every connection
  event, error, Quick Start, and Ollama failure, with copy/export.
• Settings window (⌘,) — the Projects folder location (choose a custom
  folder, takes effect next launch) plus the renderer/Night Mode toggles.
• README badge row (CI/platform/Swift/license/release), a centered title/link
  header, a full-width hero GIF, and a dedicated EXAMPLES.md catalog.

Changed

• Made the Projects browser the app's actual main window — the camera view
  only shows once a session is actually running.
• Widened/reordered the sidebar; split each right-hand tab into common
  controls plus a collapsed Advanced section; reordered the Home grid so Quick
  Start leads and New Project trails every existing project.
• Full-width Session, Capture, and Project Detail pages (no more Form-capped
  side margins), plus a dedicated Capture detail page for timeline thumbnails.
• Auto-open the Projects browser on a true first run.
• The Camera and Sidebar Tab menu-bar menus now only appear while a camera
  session is actually running, instead of always showing (often nonsensical)
  items regardless of what page is open.
• Removed the Home page's "Settings" tile from Common Tasks — Settings stays
  reachable from the toolbar button and ⌘,.
• Home page's "Common Tasks" cards (Equipment/Insights/Settings) now share a
  uniform width with New Project/All Projects, instead of each sizing itself
  to its own title/subtitle text length.

Fixed

• Ollama planning calls failing against a real (non-mocked) server, and
  requests timing out against a slower local reasoning model.
• Blank frames no longer get written into .ser recordings.
• Night Mode no longer tints the live image itself, only the surrounding UI.
• Removed the "SDK x.x.x" connected/disconnected toolbar badge — reported as
  not useful; connection state is already shown contextually elsewhere.
• Fixed the Insights/Dashboard activity chart showing phantom past-dated ticks
  for months with no real activity (a continuous date axis interpolating gaps
  between real data points; now a categorical month axis).
• Fixed the Atlas view crashing the app immediately on open — an invalid
  reversed axis range (360...0) that trapped at runtime.
• Cleared a GitHub Actions Node.js 20 deprecation warning (actions/checkout
  bumped to a Node 24 release).
• Widened a UI test's timeout after an isolated CI scheduling flake.

v0.2.0 — Acquisition Wizard, per-channel histogram/curves, mesh drift correction

Sky for Mac (skyformac) v0.2.0

The second tagged release. Still a development build — treat it as a preview, not a finished product. This release is almost entirely new capture/imaging workflow on top of v0.1.12's foundation: an Acquisition Wizard, Smart Live Stack, a full per-channel histogram/curves grading pipeline, and an experimental mesh-based drift correction technique, plus a batch of real hang/regression fixes found and fixed along the way.

How to run this build (same as before — read before opening)

The attached .zip is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. macOS will refuse to launch it after downloading — sometimes with the familiar "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" dialog, but on current macOS it can also just silently fail to launch (Console will show OS_REASON_ENDPOINTSECURITY ... denied the process from executing). This is Gatekeeper reacting to the missing Developer ID signature/notarization, not a broken build.

To run it, clear the quarantine flag the browser attaches to anything downloaded from the internet:

xattr -cr /path/to/skyformac.app

(If that alone doesn't do it: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/skyformac.app, then try launching again.)

What's new since v0.1.12

Acquisition Wizard — pick a target (Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, or a curated deep-sky list: M13/M56/M31/M42/M45/M51/M57/M27/M81/M8) and get a recommended starting setup — mode, ROI, gain, exposure, Reduce Drift/Smart Live Stack/Mesh Drift Correction — applied in one step. Save/Load Preset round-trip a setup to its own JSON file and work standalone too, from the Camera menu or right next to the camera in the sidebar.

Smart Live Stack (Autopilot) — turns Live Stack into a self-curating stack: every incoming frame is scored for sharpness and only folded in if it clears a quality floor (or discarded if Cloud Sentinel flags a cloud interruption), with a live kept/rejected count and an estimated-SNR-gain readout.

Mesh-Based Drift Correction (Experimental) — an alternative to the existing single-star-lock drift reduction: tracks an NxN grid of points across the frame instead of one, triangulating the mesh and blending each triangle's drift with barycentric interpolation (the same primitive real-time rendering rasterizes) into a smooth, spatially-varying correction — covers field rotation and differential drift a single global shift can't. Configurable mesh size, search-window overlap, and reaction sensitivity, with a live preview overlay showing the actual tracked grid and displacement vectors. Marked Experimental deliberately — its per-point measurement is a rougher single-pass estimate than the single-star lock's, and it hasn't been validated on real hardware yet.

Histogram overhaul — a "By Channel" toggle shows separate Red/Green/Blue histograms instead of the combined one, and switches the Black/White Point stretch from one shared pair to three fully independent pairs, for correcting a color imbalance (e.g. a light-polluted sky's orange cast) directly at the stretch stage.

Curves tab — Photoshop-style tone-curve grading next to the histogram: a master RGB curve plus independent Red/Green/Blue curves layered on top of it, applied as a post-stretch pass on both render paths, off by default.

Detachable Histogram/Curves panel — pop both into a separate floating window that can overlap the main one and stay open while working elsewhere.

"Running" status list — every currently-active pipeline (Live Stack, Lucky Imaging, Recording to Disk, SER recording, Planetary Tracking, Polar Alignment, Cloud Sentinel, Focus Assist) gets its own row right next to the camera, whether or not its own tab happens to be showing — with a one-click jump to its controls and a one-click Stop.

Other new capture features: an exported-files viewer (browse/reopen any FITS/PNG/TIFF/JPEG this app has written or exported), GPU satellite/aircraft streak masking for Live Stack, a full RGB24 (webcam/iPhone) pipeline for Live Stack and Lucky Imaging, GPU drift reduction (single-star lock-on alignment) with Pause/Resume, SER video recording, planetary presets (Saturn/Jupiter/Mars/Venus/Moon), ZWO gain/offset presets, a live dropped-frame counter, and ST4 pulse-guide buttons (untested against real guiding hardware).

Real fixes worth knowing about:

• GPUSharpnessScorer (Smart Live Stack's/Record to Disk's quality gate) had no resolution cap, unlike its CPU sibling — a full-native-resolution Laplacian pass on every incoming frame, which is what actually caused the app to hang when the Moon's Acquisition Wizard preset (full-sensor ROI + Smart Live Stack on by default) was applied and a burst started.
• Capture ROI always landed at the sensor's top-left corner regardless of the requested center — fixed, with a read-back confirmation showing what the camera actually applied.
• Small-ROI live view flicker/slowdown, and a live-view regression that had crept back in — both fixed.
• Live Stack and Lucky Imaging silently did nothing for an iPhone/webcam (RGB24) source — fixed.

Known limitations (dev-mode caveats, mostly unchanged from v0.1.12)

• Real ZWO hardware testing remains daytime-only. A full overnight/dark-sky session with a real ASI camera is still outstanding — this release's new features (Mesh Drift Correction especially) have not been run against real night-sky conditions.
• Not notarized, ad-hoc signed only. See "How to run this build" above.
• No geometric alignment in stacking beyond single-star/mesh drift correction — still no full multi-star registration the way a dedicated stacking tool does.
• Not a full plate solver. Star recognition/polar alignment use a small hand-curated bright-star catalog and triangle-similarity matching, not a general blind solver — sparse star fields may not resolve.
• Mesh-Based Drift Correction is genuinely experimental — validated with unit tests and a live preview overlay, not yet against a real tracking-error scenario on real hardware.
• ST4 guiding is untested against real guiding hardware — no ST4-cabled mount has been available to confirm a pulse produces a real correction end to end.

Requirements

macOS 14+, Apple Silicon recommended for the GPU render path. ZWO ASI camera optional — an iPhone (Continuity Camera) or any webcam works as a capture source without one.

License

GPLv3, with an additional permission (GPLv3 §7) to link against ZWO's proprietary ASI Camera SDK. See LICENSE.md/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md in the repository.

v0.1.12 — first release (dev mode)

Sky for Mac (skyformac) v0.1.12 — first release, still in active development

This is the first tagged release of Sky for Mac, a native SwiftUI/AppKit astrophotography capture app for ZWO ASI cameras, iPhone (Continuity Camera), and other USB webcams. It's still a development build — expect rough edges, and treat it as a preview rather than a finished product. Feedback and issue reports are welcome.

How to run this build (important — read before opening)

The attached .zip is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. macOS will refuse to launch it after downloading — sometimes with the familiar "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" dialog, but on current macOS it can also just silently fail to launch (Console will show OS_REASON_ENDPOINTSECURITY ... denied the process from executing). Either way, this is Gatekeeper reacting to the missing Developer ID signature/notarization, not a broken build.

To run it, clear the quarantine flag the browser attaches to anything downloaded from the internet, from Terminal:

xattr -cr /path/to/skyformac.app

(If that alone doesn't do it: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/skyformac.app, then try launching again.) A notarized build is planned but not done yet — see Known Limitations below.

What works

Capture sources

• ZWO ASI cameras over USB (vendored SDK) — RAW8/RAW16 streaming, full dynamic control set (gain, exposure, offset, cooler, binning, flip, etc.), single long exposures.
• iPhone via Continuity Camera, or any other USB webcam — including focus lock (fixes autofocus fighting afocal projection) and a frame-stacked "Night Mode" (10s/60s).

Rendering & performance

• GPU render path (Metal compute shaders) for debayer, stretch, denoise, wavelet sharpening, histogram, and live-stacking, with a CPU fallback. GPU dark/flat calibration.
• Pinch-to-zoom/pan live preview, a dedicated fullscreen mode with its own zoom slider.

Imaging workflow

• Dark/flat calibration, live stacking, Lucky Imaging (burst capture + sharpness-ranked stacking), continuous recording with a GPU sharpness gate and disk-space guardrail.
• Focus assist (Vision star detection + HFD focus tracking with thermal-drift alerts), planetary auto-center/crop, Smart Exposure (read-noise/sky-brightness based sub-exposure recommendation).
• Star-field recognition against a small bundled catalog, live WCS solving, a Catalog HUD overlay, and two-frame polar alignment.
• FITS/PNG/TIFF export.

Other

• All-Sky/rig monitor (secondary webcam/iPhone picture-in-picture feed with cloud/motion alerts).
• In-app Help with full-text search and a "?" shortcut next to every setting that jumps straight to its explanation.
• Night mode (red-only UI) for dark adaptation.

Known limitations (dev-mode caveats)

• Real ZWO hardware testing is partial. The capture pipeline has been exercised against a real ASI camera during the day; a full overnight/dark-sky session is still outstanding.
• Not notarized, ad-hoc signed only. See "How to run this build" above — Gatekeeper will block it until you clear the quarantine attribute.
• No geometric alignment in stacking. Live Stack and Lucky Imaging both assume a tracked, stationary mount — there's no star-alignment step, the same honest scoping SharpCap's basic live-stack mode uses.
• Not a full plate solver. Star recognition/polar alignment use a small hand-curated bright-star catalog and triangle-similarity matching, not a general blind solver like astrometry.net — sparse star fields may not resolve.
• Two originally-considered AI features (a trained Neural-Engine denoiser, AI super-resolution) were intentionally not built — they'd need a Core ML model this project doesn't have.

Requirements

macOS 14+, Apple Silicon recommended for the GPU render path. ZWO ASI camera optional — an iPhone (Continuity Camera) or any webcam works as a capture source without one.

License

GPLv3, with an additional permission (GPLv3 §7) to link against ZWO's proprietary ASI Camera SDK. See LICENSE.md/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md in the repository.