OriginStack 2.13.0

Which download?

You have	Download
Windows 10/11 (64-bit)	OriginStack-2.13.0-setup.exe — installer, Start Menu entry and uninstaller
Windows, no install	OriginStack-2.13.0-windows-x64-portable.exe — one file, runs from any folder (opens a few seconds slower), or the windows-x64.zip (Extract All first)
Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later, macOS 14+)	OriginStack-2.13.0-macos-arm64.zip
Intel Mac	OriginStack-2.13.0-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux x86-64 (glibc 2.35+)	OriginStack-2.13.0-linux-x64.tar.gz, then ./install.sh

None of them needs Python. The builds are not code-signed yet: on Windows, SmartScreen may warn — choose More info, then Run anyway. On a Mac, Control-click the app and choose Open the first time (details on the website).

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Mosaics from the Origin's Mosaic Mode, learned star removal, a reworked comet mode, a faster
first phase, a redesigned app, and fixes to multi-night combines and to how bright cores,
planetary nebulae, Milky Way fields and galaxies on bright-sky nights are rendered.

Added

• Report a problem (desktop app header): opens a new GitHub issue in the browser with the
  version, system, native-module status, the last run's error and the end of the log filled in
  (home folder shown as ~, repeated progress lines collapsed). Nothing is sent by the app; the
  user reviews and submits the issue on GitHub.
• Learned star removal (experimental): --remove-stars-method nn. A Noisier2Noise
  network trained on the Origin's own stacks removes stars from the linear stack; saturated
  stars have their halo and diffraction spikes subtracted and their cores filled, and are
  left in place when they sit in bright nebulosity. Also behind --starless-process.
• Redesigned desktop app and website: pick what you imaged from picture cards, Full
  quality or Quick look, a summary of the run before it starts, and a gallery with one image
  per kind of target, all translated.
• Mosaics (--mosaic, detected automatically). A folder of tile sessions from the Origin's
  Mosaic Mode is recognised and stitched into one image: from the Origin's own mosaic
  description (tile row and column, matched to each session by its stack UUID) when present,
  otherwise from the sessions' pointings. Panels are reprojected without the reproject
  package (the packaged app now stitches instead of silently combining), brightness and
  gradient are matched across all overlaps at once, and post-processing runs once on the
  result. Missing tiles and sessions that are not part of the mosaic are reported. Not yet
  tested on a real Mosaic Mode capture.
• Dither detection. The registration log reports whether a session was dithered and by
  how much, and the stack's header records it (DITHSTEP). The --drizzle-scale 2.0 tip now
  appears only when stars are undersampled.
• Portable Windows exe: OriginStack-<version>-windows-x64-portable.exe, one file that
  runs from any folder without installing. It unpacks itself on every start, so it opens a few
  seconds slower than the installed app or the zip.
• Other Origin-platform cameras are recognised (Origin678C, QHY183C, ASI183MC, ASI294MC
  besides the Origin178) and named in the log; a camera without a measured profile is
  recorded as such instead of being ignored.
• A note when the dark was taken at another ISO than the lights (it is scaled by exposure
  time only; scaling by the ISO gain ratio was measured and is not a reliable improvement).
• Documentation: what stacking several nights gains, with measurements.

Changed

• Comet mode finds the comet by its motion against the stars (early and late frames
  differenced in star-aligned coordinates) instead of the brightest blob, which was a bright
  star on a real SWAN session; each comet frame keeps its own field-rotation correction (star
  trails used to arc round the nucleus); and the comet + stars image subtracts the comet's
  modelled smear from the star stack instead of pasting a window over it (a fast comet came
  out with two heads). --comet-blend-sigma is accepted and ignored.

• Planetary nebulae: the masked preview stretch, no SCNR (it removed the [O III] teal) and
  no deconvolution (it mottled the shell) by default.

• Milky Way fields (wide field): the preview black point sits below the frame median, so
  the star cloud's glow and its dark nebulae stay visible.

• Faster first phase: the residual check maps each frame's own stars instead of warping
  and re-detecting, temporary frames are compressed only when the disk needs it, and the
  post-gate quality diagnostics run in parallel.

• Faster processing of the frames (Phase 1): about 35-40%. On a 158-frame session on an
  8-core laptop, Phase 1 went from ~45 s to ~28 s and the whole run from 2m26 to 2m06, with
  an identical stack. The compressed frame store no longer decodes every frame for a preview
  thumbnail that is not shown, writes frames to disk without extra copies, and Phase 1 now
  runs single-threaded workers on three quarters of the physical cores (it is limited by
  memory speed, not cores; it also holds fewer frames in memory). -j N is unchanged.

• Smoother background extraction in frame-filling nebulae. Where large areas have no sky
  samples, the background model now blends into wider fits instead of forming flat polygons
  with edges printed into the sky. Background extraction is also faster (10.8 s to 4.2 s on
  one stack). Expect slightly different backgrounds where samples are sparse.

• Learned deconvolution is chosen automatically only for the camera it was trained on
  (Origin178); other cameras keep the wavelet denoiser under --auto.

• Installing from source now needs NumPy 2.4.6 or later. astro_native 0.60.0.

Fixed

• Multi-night combines: one off-centre night no longer turns a folder into a two-panel
  "mosaic"; a night that cannot be registered is left out with a warning instead of aborting
  the whole combine; a smaller night's zero padding is no longer detected as stars (a good
  48-minute night was refused for it); and the combined stack keeps the reference night's
  WCS, so photometry and annotation work on it.

• Bright extended cores in the preview (Orion's core, the Ring Nebula, globular cluster
  cores) are rolled off instead of clipped to flat white in the default per-channel stretch.

• Galaxies on bright-sky nights: corners brightened by a flat that over-corrects the
  vignetting are treated as background even when the galaxy is too faint to detect; they came
  out pink.

• Other programs' stacks found among a session's lights are skipped. A stacked file with
  NCOMBINE or STACKCNT above 1 was taken as a light and stopped the run.

• Calibration frames are recognised from more capture programs. An IMAGETYP header of
  Dark Frame, Flat Field, Bias Frame, Offset or Zero was not understood, so such
  frames were stacked as lights unless their file name said what they were. Dark flats were
  taken as darks for the lights; they are now left out with a note (the flats are
  bias-corrected instead). (This entry was missing from 2.12.1's notes; the fix shipped now.)

• Bright blue previews between nights. In a multi-night run each night's stack is
  previewed before the combine, linear and unprocessed; a light-polluted sky that sits
  higher in one channel tinted the whole preview, bright blue at the end of every night.
  Each channel's sky level is now evened out for that preview (display only; the stacks
  and the final image are unchanged).

• Dark holes and bars next to bright stars. The sky-residual pass took a saturated
  star's halo for sky: on Mizar a dark bar ran from Mizar to Alcor. Mesh cells that stand
  far above their neighbours are now treated as sources, and gaps are bridged smoothly
  instead of copying one cell across them.

• Coloured blobs around nebulae. Where background extraction protects faint nebulosity,
  the sky under it was left with the vignetting dome still in: a maroon blob over the
  Pleiades (Maia Nebula), a hard-edged red patch around the Crab Nebula. The protected area
  now gets the same vignetting-shaped model as a galaxy's, when the samples around it show one.

• A bright column through faint-galaxy images. On a faint galaxy (Antennae) the galaxy
  protection grew into the sky gradient and covered most of the frame; background
  extraction then left a bright column. It now measures the galaxy itself.

• Targets the app did not recognise. Origin's names such as Duck Nebula, Cone Nebula,
  Pacman Nebula, Medusa Nebula, Fornax A, Markarian's Chain and "Messier 101" were not
  recognised, so the target-specific settings were not used; Thor's Helmet (Duck Nebula)
  was flattened into the sky. Catalogue answers for galaxies in pairs or groups and for
  planetary nebulae are now understood too.

• --from-stack on a multi-night or mosaic result now uses the settings the run chose:
  the combined stack gets its own _config.toml.

• The Ring Nebula keeps its ring through the dual-band filter and on short stacks. When
  most of a small bright object sits above the preview's white point, its whole range was
  squeezed into the top of the display and a strong colour clipped it to one level. The
  highlight curve now gives such an object more of the display, on the object only (the rest
  of the image is unchanged): the ring and its darker centre show in both filters. The
  highlight roll-off also missed a short stack by two pixels; its threshold is a little lower.

• Galaxy protection on a bright star. Background extraction's galaxy protection could
  centre on a saturated star instead of the galaxy (Black Eye, Fornax A). Candidates are now
  compared with the stars removed.

• Comet mode on a comet it cannot find. When the comet was too faint to find by its
  motion (C/2024 J3), comet mode aligned on the brightest object instead, a star, and wrote a
  "comet" stack built around it. It now says no comet was found, writes no comet stack (the
  star-aligned stack also holds a slow comet), and points to --comet-xy.