Change log
v2.3.1 - 26 August 2026
A small patch that keeps unmeasured catalogue entries from bumping real showpieces out of the shortlist at dark sites.
Fixed
Shortlist ranking at dark sites (Bortle 4 and darker). Catalogue entries with no measured brightness - placeholder surface-brightness values from the Cederblad and van den Bergh reflection-nebula lists, plus unmeasured NGC/IC rows - were being scored as if the placeholder were a real measurement, and could outrank proper targets. In our own review, a Bortle-4 site in mid-November put an unnamed fragment of the Pleiades reflection nebulosity (Ced 19h) in the hero slot ahead of the Crab Nebula (NGC 1952). Placeholder brightness can no longer make an object rate as an easy catch, and the 45 lettered Cederblad fragments (the haloes around individual Pleiades stars - the picture is M45) no longer compete as targets. Every Cederblad designation still works in search. Catalogue count 11,264 to 11,219. Bortle 5 and brighter skies were unaffected.
Tie-break. Scores were capped at 100 before comparison, so two strong candidates could read as a tie and the hero went to whichever rose first. The Crab had in fact won on merit (102.3 vs 100.0). Ranking now compares the uncapped score, and the same correction applies to the "keyhole" guard that protects a hero with a narrow visibility window.
Seven named objects with placeholder brightness are now rated as fainter targets that reward integration, rather than easy catches, at Bortle 3: the Witch Head, Angel Nebula, Toby Jug, IC 349 (Barnard's Merope Nebula), the Mice, Seyfert's Sextet and Stephan's Quintet. Our astronomy adviser confirms this is correct - they are hard.
Recipe wording. The free-tier sub-exposure card said Pro tunes the sub to "tonight's wind and moon". The moon never changes the sub length. It now says Pro trims the sub for tonight's wind and finds the sky-limited length.
Notes
No new features and no settings changes.
Upgrading from any earlier version: just run the new installer - your settings, logbook and licence key carry over.
Microsoft Store: v2.3 is still in Microsoft's review; v2.3.1 will follow there once it clears. Both routes deliver the same application.
v2.3 - 23 August 2026
A catalogue of 11,000+ objects - and an engine that is franker about which of them your rig can actually take.
Added
11,000+ objects - the catalogue grows from 10,181 to 11,264 rows with the Sharpless HII regions, the curated Barnard dark nebulae, van den Bergh and Cederblad nebulae, Abell planetaries, the Arp peculiar galaxies, the Hickson compact groups (see below) and the open clusters of the Collinder, Melotte, Trumpler, Stock, Berkeley and King lists. Every new row carries a surface-brightness rating reviewed by our astronomy adviser. Objects already present under another name became searchable aliases ("Sh2-277" finds IC 434), 27 nicknames now resolve that did not (Tadpoles, Cygnus Loop, Pickering's Triangle, Eskimo, Phantom, Skull, Keyhole, Silver Coin, Hamburger, Ptolemy Cluster among them), and M45 and IC 1318 - the Pleiades and the Sadr region - are back after going missing in v2.2. Hand-added rows for the Squid Nebula (OU4), Dark Shark, Propeller, Soap Bubble, Jones-Emberson 1, Baby Eagle and Orion's Belt. Dark nebulae are now a type of their own, with a Bortle check: a dark nebula cannot be darker than a Bortle-7 sky, and the engine says so.
The Hickson compact groups - all 100 of them, from catalogue VII/213 at CDS VizieR: the tight knots of interacting galaxies, Stephan's Quintet among them. Ninety-nine sit in the catalogue under their own HCG number rather than folded into a member galaxy; the hundredth was already there as IC 700, which "HCG 54" now finds. Used with Paul Hickson's permission; the DATA SOURCES panel cites Hickson (1982, ApJ 255, 382) with the author's kind permission. Our astronomy adviser reviewed the rows first, applying a surface-brightness floor and a V-R colour term to them.
Several saved sites - Settings > Saved Sites keeps up to six observing sites (home, dark site, club field), each with its own horizon mask. Switch from the dashboard's Location readout and the night is re-planned from there.
Several saved NINA sequences - Settings > Saved Sequences keeps LRGB, narrowband and focus-offset templates side by side; pick which one to fill from the SEND TO NINA button, and the one you pick becomes the active template. The File Bridge settings now explain what goes in the box, what Coach changes and what it never touches.
"Project done" in the log - tick a log entry as done and that target is never suggested again until you untick it. A plain logged capture still rests for 90 days.
The best fortnight, in your diary - the Seasonal Planner exports its best 14-night window as an .ics (one all-day entry per night with that night's dark hours and moon) or a one-click Google Calendar entry. Geometry and moon only.
Sky map on the dashboard - a SKY MAP panel with 15-60 degree zoom chips and a default that adapts to your rig. Under the score, the identity column shows YOUR FRAME and THE OBJECT as survey cutouts.
Gain and offset for CMOS astro cameras - 44 ZWO, QHY, Player One and SVBONY models now show gain and offset instead of ISO, on the card, in the briefing and in the NINA file. QHY 268 and 600 show their readout mode. Class-typical values are flagged in the briefing as a starting point. DSLRs are unchanged.
A new launch screen with a real boot checklist.
Changed
Fewer targets your rig cannot take. An object under 24 pixels across on your sensor is gated "too small for your rig" rather than ranked; small planetary nebulae (under 120 pixels) are scored down in proportion, so a 408 mm refractor is no longer told to shoot the Blue Snowball; faint broadband objects lose score gradually towards the hopeless line instead of tying with bright galaxies.
Emission targets are judged by the filter class you own (none/CLS, UHC, dual-band wide or tight, line) and whether the sensor is mono. A filterless OSC is not sent to the Bubble; an OIII-dominant faint planetary reads as a skip on broadband glass and an integration project with a line filter.
Sub length knows your mount. Alt-az gets a field-rotation cap, an unguided equatorial a periodic-error cap from focal length, a guided equatorial a sky-limited length from your camera's read noise and your Bortle class - and the card says why a number is short ("Held short - alt-az field rotation"). A tracking-only mount with no GoTo gets an honest framing multiplier on big targets.
The seeing penalty now anchors on your own site's forecast climate, learnt over a week of nights, rather than one fixed scale - a mountain site's nights are told apart again.
Corrections: IC 1396 (the Elephant's Trunk complex) and a sweep of suspect sizes; globulars NGC 3201, 4372 and 6101 re-rated EASY from the Harris catalogue; naked-eye clusters (Alpha Persei, Hyades, Orion's Belt) read EASY.
Dashboard straight talk. The pick is labelled "Optimal Target - Tonight" (the night's pick, not this minute's); the TIMELY strip is always on and says "none" when there is nothing, with the comet gate matched to your aperture; the "Ephemeris" tab is now "Target Detail"; narration tone chips read "Full Coach" and "Just the facts", and the Narration settings spell out what the briefing does, what it never touches and exactly what leaves the machine on Pro - the target name and tonight's numbers, nothing else.
Fresh installs now default to an equatorial, guided mount. Existing settings are untouched.
The update banner now downloads the installer directly from the release (from the next update onward).
Notes
Upgrading from v2.2, v2.1, v2.0 or v1.0: just run the new installer - your settings, logbook and licence key carry over.
Being submitted to the Microsoft Store alongside this release; Store installs update themselves once Microsoft's review completes. Both routes deliver the same application.
Nothing moved behind the paywall in this release: everything that was free in v2.2 is still free.
v2.2 - 16 August 2026
Fewer confident words on an uncertain night — and a first run that starts with your sky, not a placeholder.
Added
Set-up before the first plan — a brand-new install now opens on the Settings page and asks for your observing site and rig before it computes anything, instead of starting from a placeholder location. Existing installs are untouched: if you're already set up, nothing changes.
A "Right now" cloud line — the dashboard adds a "Right now: ~X% low/mid cloud" reading whenever the current hour disagrees with the verdict for the night as a whole.
A calm page for midsummer at high latitude — above roughly 49° north (Scotland, Scandinavia, Canada) the sun never reaches astronomical darkness for weeks around June, and the app used to stop with an error on launch there. It now says plainly that there's no astronomical darkness tonight, with links onward to Weather and Settings. Southern observers in June are unaffected — that's midwinter.
Changed
A GO over a patchy sky no longer calls it clear. The verdict reads "mostly clear but PATCHY" and names both the best clear run and the cloudy spell.
When the clear hours cover less than three-quarters of the dark window, the call is capped at MARGINAL rather than GO.
Forecast age is now measured from the weather model's own issue time rather than from when the app fetched it. An ageing forecast wears a STALE badge; once it's too old to trust for cloud, the verdict word steps aside for SKY-CHECK — go and look. The target ranking stays either way, because geometry doesn't age.
The moon penalty reads the filter you own. Owned filters are now classed as broadband, UHC, duo-band (wide), duo-band (tight) or narrow line, and the moon-brightness penalty uses a tolerance per class, so a tight duo-band or single-line filter is allowed more moon than a UHC. The Seestar and DWARF built-in duo filters are classed as duo-band wide. UHC owners see no change.
Under the bonnet, the seeing feed is now fetched over HTTPS, and the engine has been consolidated into one shared core so the desktop and future apps compute identical verdicts.
Notes
Upgrading from v2.1, v2.0 or v1.0: just run the new installer — your settings, logbook and licence key carry over.
Also on the Microsoft Store, where installs update themselves with no download needed. Both routes deliver the same application.
Nothing moved behind the paywall in this release: everything that was free in v2.1 is still free.
v2.1 - 5 August 2026
Tonight’s target was already decided. This release answers the sub, the week and the season.
Added
Seven-night outlook — one tile per night for the week ahead, each with a GO / MARGINAL / NO-GO call, moon percentage and dark window. Tonight and tomorrow are free; nights three to seven are Pro. Forecast skill fades past about three days, so every Pro night is labelled an outlook rather than a firm verdict.
Tonight’s timeline strip — a colour strip across the dark window showing where clear sky, target altitude and moonlight actually overlap, so the usable stretch of the night reads at a glance.
Seasonal planner — pick a target and see its best month, and best fortnight, over the coming year at your site. Geometry rather than forecasting, so it works fully offline.
Sub-exposure verdict — one honest line suggesting a sub length from your camera’s read noise against the sky brightness at your Bortle class, with 91 cameras classed. Mount and scope limits always win: it will never suggest a sub your mount can’t track.
36 more southern showpieces — the hand-curated gem list grows from 81 to 117, and the southern set from 15 to 51, including 47 Tucanae, Omega Centauri, NGC 6397, the Carina Nebula, the Tarantula and the Helix.
Two more smart telescopes — one-pick presets for the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro and the Dwarflab DWARF Mini.
Changed
Shortlist targets now open instantly — clicking a target used to pause for several seconds before the panel appeared.
The timely-comet callout now lists every comet worth chasing tonight, not just the best-placed one, and each is a link straight to its own panel.
Notes
Upgrading from v2.0 or v1.0: just run the new installer — your settings, logbook and licence key carry over.
The nightly decision stays free, along with the timeline strip, the seasonal planner, the sub-exposure verdict and the first two nights of the week view.
v2.0 - 27 July 2026
Added
Northern Hemisphere support — the full-sky catalogue now scores 10,181 objects across both hemispheres, with 66 hand-curated northern showpieces joining the southern set. No toggle needed: your site latitude decides your sky.
Smart telescope presets — one-pick rig setup for ZWO Seestar S50 & S30, Dwarf 3, Vaonis Vespera II & Pro, Unistellar Odyssey and Celestron Origin.
Daylight theme — a light UI alongside the night-friendly console, switchable in Settings.
In-app update notice — the app now tells you when a new release is out.
Changed
Faster startup — no more blank window on launch.
Morning check now answers for the coming night, not the one just finished.
Notes
Upgrading from v1.0: just run the new installer — your settings and logbook carry over.
v1.0 - 22 July 2026
First public release. Windows, free download
Added
Tonight’s decision: one hero target plus a shortlist, scored for your rig, your site and tonight’s sky
Plain-English “why” debrief for the night’s pick
Conditions call: weather, moon and darkness weighed into a verdict on the night
Timely targets: well-placed comets and active supernovae alerts
Check a target: score any target you type in, including honest NOs
Horizon mask: draw your site’s skyline so scoring respects what you can actually see; imports NINA/Stellarium horizon files
Fully offline free core — no account required
Offline-first free core no account required — the decision runs fully offline; alerts and weather use internet when available
Send-to-NINA sequence export (Pro)
Tonight-tuned exposure recipes with wind-aware sub lengths (Pro)
Session Log: night diary with photo attachments (Pro)
Watchlist (Pro)
Multi-Night Tracker: logged hours vs an integration goal, per target (Pro)
Live AI narration (Pro)
Notes
v1.0 targets the Southern Hemisphere. Northern Hemisphere support is coming.