Version 2.2.0
DernièreBuild 298 ·
New
- PixInsight connector: a script that connects PixInsight to your Nebulis library. (@jjmartres)
- Browse your objects and nights from inside PixInsight and download a night's sub-frames.
- Find the matching darks, flats and bias in your Calibration Library.
- Back up process icons and project files to an object's Project archives.
- Turn it on under Settings -> Features (off by default), then add the repository URL shown there in PixInsight (Resources -> Updates -> Manage Repositories).
- It signs in with a personal key from Settings -> API keys. A key acts as you, with your access (a viewer's key is read-only), shows when it was last used and can be revoked at any time. You can have up to 5.
- Explore: a new page, in the top menu, for finding something to photograph.
- Search any name or catalog number (Pelican, M42, Caldwell 14), or browse by kind: Galaxies, Emission nebulae, Planetary nebulae, Supernova remnants, Star clusters and Showpieces.
- The search box and tabs stay on screen when you open a category or a list of results, and a row of category chips moves you straight from one kind to another, keeping your filters.
- Each object says whether you can see it from your site tonight (or in which months) and whether it fits your telescope's frame, is a tight crop, is tiny or needs a mosaic.
- Add it to your wishlist, plan it for tonight, or open Plan a night to pick from the next 30 nights.
- Browse tiles work offline, and the Download catalog images job now also fetches the best objects in each category.
- Your wishlist moved in as a second tab, beside Discover, so finding a target and keeping it are on one page. Priority, notes, scheduling and JSON import/export work as before, and the search above both tabs adds straight to it. Wishlist is no longer its own item in the top menu; old links and the Planner's Open full Wishlist button land on the tab.
- Hide Explore under Settings -> General -> Navigation bar. If you had Explore hidden and Wishlist showing, Explore is turned back on once so your list stays one click away.
- Best tonight means the same thing in Planner, Explore and Wishlist: how well a target is placed tonight, blended with how rewarding it is to shoot.
- The Planner's target list has an Order menu (Best tonight or Best conditions) and a compass button that opens Explore on the night you are planning.
- Explore and Wishlist cards link back to the Planner.
- Annotate: open a picture in the viewer and tap the target button to draw rings and names over the objects in it, each dwith a details card.
- Stacked pictures are plate solved in the background, after each sync and every ten minutes while the library is idle. Turn it off under Settings -> Library.
- With the rings showing, Download and Share ask whether to keep the original or save a JPEG with the rings drawn in.
- Coming to the iPhone, iPad and Android apps in their 2.1.0 release.
- Settings: easier to find your way around.
- A search box at the top finds any setting by name and jumps to it. Press / to focus it.
- The sidebar is grouped under Equipment, System and Advanced, and only the page you are on stays open.
- Sites and Catalogs now live under Sky.
- Frame quality: a night's Sub-frames list (on its observation page) shows what is wrong with each raw frame.
- Every frame gets a score from 0 to 100 and a Good, Fair or Bad grade against the rest of its night, with flags for clouds, star trails, soft stars, satellite or plane streaks, no stars and noise.
- Sort any column, see the whole night in a strip that names the longest gap, hide good frames with Flagged only, and rest on a row for a larger preview with every reason in words.
- Opening a night measures it in the background and keeps the results. Settings -> Library can measure new nights automatically.
- Select bad frames and discard them (a frame in a linked folder asks first).
- Analyze Frames, on an object page, opens the same review with a night picker. Administrators can run it.
- Keep and reject frames: mark frames Keep, Reject or back to following their grade.
- In the picture viewer, press K to keep and X to reject.
- Export a night's numbers as a CSV with an accepted column for PixInsight or Siril scripts.
- Suggested integration goals: in an object's Integration section, Goals now has a Suggest goals button. The Wishlist popup has it too, so you can plan hours for a target before you have imported anything. Explore and the Planner show the progress of a goal that already exists, without editing it. Pick the telescope you will shoot with and the plan only names filters that telescope can use: a SeeStar or Dwarf is treated as a color camera, and for an ASIAIR or custom rig you list its camera and filters under Settings -> Telescopes. With no narrowband filter it plans broadband and says so.
- It proposes hours per filter from how bright the object is (its magnitude and size, or its type when the catalog has neither), your site's Bortle class, how much the Moon is allowed to cost, and a quality level: Standard, Deep or Showpiece.
- Pick a color or mono camera and the hours are split across the filters we recommend for that kind of object.
- It is an estimate to plan with. Use these hours fills the goal fields, and nothing is saved until you press Save.
- Export for stacking: the object menu builds a ZIP of the kept lights from the nights you pick. (@jjmartres)
- It adds the matching darks, flats, flat darks and bias from your Calibration Library, laid out for PixInsight WBPP or Siril, and lists what is missing before you download.
- Combine subs can leave out rejected and bad frames.
- Integration per filter: the object page has an Integration card with the time shot through each filter, a goal you can set per filter, and what is left. (@jjmartres)
- Library, Wishlist and Planner cards show it as "4h left · Ha".
- Merge filter names that differ between telescopes (Ha, H-alpha, H) under Settings -> Library -> Filter aliases.
- Plan My Night: smarter about weather, filters and the Moon. (@jjmartres)
- It reads the hourly forecast, leaves cloudy slots empty and says which, and puts small targets in the steadiest air. Turn this off in the Plan My Night dialog.
- It suggests the filter with the most time left that the Moon allows, and favours objects with time left toward their goals.
- Objects you can only image in narrowband count as narrowband only when your Gear lists a dual-band, tri-band or narrowband filter.
- Mark a block broadband or narrowband. A nebula 40 degrees from a full Moon is no longer flagged red when shot through a narrowband filter, and the night header says which kind of filter suits tonight.
- Plan vs actual: scheduled blocks show how much was captured ("1h 40m / 3h"), and the Observations calendar shows planned nights next to what you shot. (@jjmartres)
- Plan a missed block again the next night or mark it skipped.
- A block that ended less than a day ago with nothing imported yet shows "Awaiting import".
- Rigs and optical trains: each night is tied to one of its telescope's optical configurations (Native, Reducer 0.75x). (@jjmartres)
- The rig is the one chosen on the observation page, else read from the focal length in the pictures' headers, else the telescope's only configuration.
- The object page can group nights by rig, the Observations list has a Rig column and filter, and folder import has an Optical train choice.
- Alerts: Settings -> Alerts sends a message to an ntfy topic, a Discord or Slack channel, or any webhook (Home Assistant, n8n). (@jjmartres)
- Choose events per channel: a clear night is coming, an import finishes or fails, or an update is available. Channels can be paused or tested.
- The clear-night check runs once each evening at a time you choose.
- Messages come in English, French, German, Spanish and Dutch, and webhooks can be signed.
- iPhone push needs the iPhone app's 2.1.0 release, coming soon. Turn on Alerts from this server, then pick what each phone gets under Settings -> Alerts -> iPhones.
- Each iPhone can add a Tonight's plan line or a Dew risk warning to its alert (also needs app 2.1.0).
- My Catalog: a wall of your own pictures for each catalog, with an edit mode to choose which picture each tile shows and a poster you can save. Open it from a catalog's board on the Catalogs page.
- Combined object page: a new object page with every picture of the object in one place, in tabs for Images, Subframes, Nights and Projects, with your processed images shown large at the top. It is now the default. Switch to the Classic page, a grid of observations, with the small toggle at the top right of any object page, or pick the default under Settings -> Library -> Object pages. Classic may be removed in a future version.
- Mosaic layout: next to the grid, the Library and the Gallery can show a Mosaic that sizes each tile by how much you have done with it. Switch with the Layout control in their toolbars.
- Collapsible banners: the banner at the top of most pages folds to one slim row with the page's key figures, and Nebulis remembers your choice for each page. The Planner's night banner folds the same way.
- Turn on Settings -> General -> Compact page banners to start every page folded.
- Pictures of your gear and sites:
- Add your own photo of a telescope under Settings -> Telescopes -> Edit. A cut-out on a transparent background looks best.
- Add photos of the garden, the skyline or the spot you set up from under each site in Settings -> Sky -> Sites. The iPhone and iPad app can take them too, from app 2.1.0.
- SeeStar dark library: the darklibrary folder at the root of the telescope's storage is copied on every sync and shows on the Calibrations page with your other darks.
- If the telescope rebuilds it, the new files replace the copies and the old ones go to a hidden folder.
- Add Telescope (Settings -> Telescopes) has a new Sync calibration frames switch, on by default, that also covers Dwarf CALI_FRAME and ASIAIR Dark, Flat and Bias.
- Restore from the archive brings objects back: restoring from an archive disk no longer stops at objects your library has lost. Objects that are gone are added back, objects in the trash are revived, and their files, nights and layout are restored. Catalog details, thumbnails and weather follow, as after an import.
- Settings -> Archive -> Browse: objects the library does not have say so, and Restore N objects brings back everything that is missing in one go.
- Use an existing library: in Settings -> Storage -> Move, tick Use an existing library to point Nebulis at a folder or network share that already holds your library, such as a backup, without copying anything.
- Afterwards Nebulis registers the files it finds, moves objects whose folder is not there to the trash (restorable, with their notes and observations kept) and removes file records that point at nothing.
- Settings -> Storage -> Cleanup: Objects with no folder now also finds objects that have observations but no files, even after Missing files was repaired first.
Updated
- Speed: FITS thumbnails and previews build about ten to thirty times faster, so a 50 MB stacked frame takes about a tenth of a second.
- Small stars are kept instead of dropped. Thumbnails are redrawn once after the update.
- Catalog and sky pictures load faster and fail less often when the sky survey is slow.
- Object page: easier to scan.
- The banner shows the name, one line with status and telescopes, the object's other names, and a single row of figures (observations, sub-frames, magnitude and distance).
- Tonight's visibility and the filter recommendations share a panel beside it. About is a collapsed row at the bottom, and Integration and Processing Projects share one card.
- Object names and catalog numbers come from one catalog, checked against Wikipedia and the OpenNGC database.
- Popular names were added where missing (Ghost of Cassiopeia, Statue of Liberty Nebula, Crystal Ball Nebula, Southern Pleiades, Running Chicken Nebula, Spirograph Nebula and others), and abbreviations are spelled out ("tet Car Cluster" is now the Southern Pleiades).
- A Sharpless number now opens the same object as its NGC or IC number (Sh2-190 is the Heart Nebula, Sh2-275 the Rosette), and so does an old duplicate NGC or IC number. Folders already in your library under one of these numbers are merged on the next server start.
- Any NGC or IC number now resolves to its object, including faint ones that are not in the browse list. "Also known as" no longer repeats the object's own name or number.
- Catalog pictures are checked before they ship, and updating the catalog packs replaces the old pictures.
- Left out: pictures with a "New Image" banner, labels, arrows or diagrams, thin strips of a galaxy's edge, black holes where a mosaic has no data, and copies shared between objects. Hand-picked replacements cover the Sun, the moons and planets and about thirty deep-sky objects.
- Hubble pictures are twice as sharp, sky plates are framed to each object's size, and the southern Sharpless nebulae now show as clear red H-alpha clouds from the ESO VPHAS+ survey.
- Every Caldwell, Messier and Sharpless description now describes the right object (the Beehive Cluster no longer shows the article about a beehive).
- Library Health (Settings -> Storage -> Cleanup): a new Duplicate session files check finds a capture stored twice under one object and deletes the second copy only after the bytes match the first.
- Folder import shows "Finishing" once every file is copied, instead of a full bar that looks hung.
- Planner: the night strip has a legend for its bars, dots and Moon disks.
Fixed
- Forecast and Planner scores now agree: the same night could read "Bad 16" in the Planner and "Fair 42" on the Sky Forecast page. The three upcoming-night cards on the Forecast page now use the Planner's score, so the Moon and the seeing count in both, and both use the same words (Bad, Poor, Fair, Good, Great, Ideal). Scores on the cards drop on moonlit nights.
- Caldwell 102 and 103 pointed at the wrong objects. C102 is now the Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) and C103 the Tarantula Nebula.
- Library objects:
- A target named with a description, such as "NGC 2244 Satellite Cluster" or "10P Tempel", now joins NGC 2244 or 10P instead of showing up as a second object, and its mosaics group under it. Existing objects are merged on the next server start.
- Objects whose folder name has a space ("C 5") could show "No images yet" while the folder was full, after an old startup repair renamed it. Nebulis puts the folder name back on the next start and no longer renames folders.
- Star clusters M24, M35, M44, M46, M48, M67 and M75 showed the Crab Nebula as their catalog picture, from a stale Hubble image the catalog pack never replaced. Nebulis now checks its Hubble images against the pack after an update and replaces any that differ.
- Import:
- A restacked picture whose copy failed left an empty object behind that raised the "your library needs a one-time update" prompt. The object is now removed, and new ones start in the current layout.
- The import dialog could sit at 100% for a minute or more on a slow network while thumbnails were fetched. It now waits at most ten seconds and builds the rest on first view.
- Session report listed only the first filter of a night shot in Ha then OIII. It lists every filter now.
- Time zones: dates now follow your clock and your site's, never the time in Greenwich (UTC).
- The Observations calendar marked tomorrow as today every evening (from 7pm in the US Central zone, for example).
- "Up tonight" on catalog and wishlist cards, and in the iPhone and Android apps, could ask about the wrong night between midnight and dawn when the server runs in Docker. Its best months could also be a month off on the last evening of a month.
- The Planner's dark window and an object's Tonight panel are now worked out for the site's own night, even when your browser is set to another time zone.
- Folder import put a FITS file's UTC capture time down as local time, so a frame taken after midnight could land on the next night. Files without a date in their name use the site's time zone now.
- Downloaded sub-frame ZIPs, the session report and the Moon phase on new notes read the date in the site's time zone instead of the server's.