iObserve

iObserve makes your preparation of astronomical observations a breeze. It gathers automatically and easily all the information you need when observing the sky with small and big telescopes. It has been built from the ground up by an experienced professional astronomer.

Features:

• Resolve an object coordinates with SIMBAD
• Access automatically its aliases, magnitudes, and NASA ADS references
• Display the equatorial, celestial, galactic coordinates, in whatever epoch and units
• Access the ViziR catalogue pages, and ADS abstract page.
• Draw its airmass curve for for about 90 builtin observatories on Earth
• Draw simulatenously multiple airmass curves of different objects for comparison
• Get the table of the selected objects sorted according to their time of minimum airmass
• See the Moon's airmass curve in place, and its minimum separation to any object, when relevant
• Observe the airmass curve over a night whose length and shift can be largely customized to even satisfy radio astronomers!
• Slide easily the night date to match future's observing dates
• Find automatically for you the closest Landolt and UKIRT standard stars
• Know how much time an object spends above a given altitude during the night
• Get the time and length of the nights for 4 different twilights limits
• Perform searches in the object's references

If you have your own astronomical observatory, being a remote amateur or professional observatory, or simply your backyard, simply enter its coordinates, and you will be able to use it like any other built-in observatory.

iObserve also provides its famous times bar with Local Time, UTC, (Modified) Julian Date and the Local Mean Sidereal Time of an observatory you can choose.

A place to store astronomy-related websites is also provided, as well as a full-screen mode.

This update fixes two small issues with manual coordinates for new objects, as well as the webservice URL for individual exoplanets. This should prevent the planet mass and other important parameters to disappear upon update. Oh, and the buttons (and other small visual tweaks) in Mavericks have been restored in their previous shine...

New in 1.4: Some new features, lots of small fixes, but is also made for the app to keep up with new OS X versions. The internals have been modernised, the support for OS X 10.7 and 10.8 has been dropped, and the look has been refreshed and flattened. Oh, and a redesigned "New Object" sheet should allow you to not be confused anymore between the objects resolved by name, and the ones entered manually.

Here are the details. Among the new features and improvements:

• Allowed to change the scaling of curve plots down to 1 hour, and the shift across 72 hours.
• Redesigned 'New Object' sheet to avoid confusion for manuel and automatic coordinates.
• Adding the possibility to drag-and-draw a triangle with separation values between points in Finding Charts.
• Updated the catalogue of exoplanets.
• Added the possibility to sort the columns of the exoplanets table.
• Reorganisation of the 'References' of an object to a dedicated and searchable 'tab'.
• Added the possibility to sort a folder of objects either alphabetically or using R.A..
• Introduced various "observatory aliases" to ease the finding of some common telescopes.
• Improved the map showing the separation of observatories (when more than one is selected at the same time).

And the bugfixes:

• The tracking distance in finding charts now gives the same answer as in Aladin from CDS.
• Fixed an issue that was provoking, sometimes, a freeze of curve plots.
• Fixed the deletion of separators.
• Fixed an issue with the detection type in the 'New Exoplanet' sheet.
• Lots of fixes on the Finding Charts, especially in the secondary windows.
• Fixed the missing colors information of the standard stars
• Fixed the ordering of dropped items when drag-and-dropping multiple items in the left-hand tree.
• Fixed the drag & drop when dragging multiple items from different levels.
• Fixed the (very tricky) drawing of the shadow on the Times converter Earth map.

Moreover, iObserve shouldn't use as much memory as before and some optimisations have been made.