Changelog
What's changed.
Every pipeline release and every change to the site you can see, newest first. Each job is stamped with the pipeline version that processed it. How the pipeline works explains the stages.
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- Bright nebula cores keep their colour and detail. Since 0.9.0 the brightest part of a nebula no longer burns out to white, but in the Orion Nebula the core became a flat, pale grey area and lost its red. Now the brightness of the core is reduced as one smooth layer, and the red, green and blue in it are reduced by the same amount. The core keeps its colour and the dark lanes and small structures in it stay visible. The sky does not change. This step no longer dims stars on dark sky, so the brightest stars can look a little larger and whiter.
- On such a nebula, the step that corrects star colour now corrects only the stars. Before, it also took some red out of the nebula around them.
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- The upload step is clearer. The button now says "Process image" with the number of credits it uses, and the line under it says how many you will have left. If you do not have enough credits, it says when your free credits come back.
- "Your images" is the new home of the app. It shows everything you have made as thumbnails, newest first, and you can upload the next one from the same page. Old links to the upload page take you there.
- Rate a result with one tap. A finished image asks "Happy with this result?" with 👍 and 👎. After 👎 you can tell us in a few words what is wrong.
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- Stelora now uses credits. You get 12 free credits every month, with no account and no email. One stacked image (a single file, a mosaic included) uses 1 credit. A set of raw subs uses 3 to 5, depending on its size. A job that fails gives its credits back.
- You see the price before anything uploads. After you pick a file, Stelora shows how many credits it uses. Nothing is sent until you press the button.
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- Long sessions come back much closer to full size. On an alt-az mount the sky turns during the night, so some of your subs miss the corners of the frame. The finished image used to be cut down to the area that almost all subs covered. Now it keeps every area that at least half of your subs cover, and most of the extra noise at those edges is smoothed out. The edges can still look a little grainier than the middle. A two-night M27 grew from 800x1716 to about 1048x1748 of the 1080x1920 sensor.
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- The brightest stars are no longer tinted cyan. The step that corrects star colour across the field also took a little red out of the brightest star cores, which were already neutral. It now leaves those cores alone.
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- Full-size (2x) Seestar captures finish again. Version 0.9.0 made every one of them fail during noise removal. They now get the result 0.9.0 was meant to give.
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- Bright nebula cores are no longer a flat white patch. On a target with a bright core, such as M42, the brightest part used to be pushed to pure white. It now stops just short of white, so you see structure in the core. In M42 the four Trapezium stars and the glow round them are no longer one white blob.
- Star fields and galaxies are not affected. On them this change only turned the brightest stars into grey discs, so it is left off.
- The faint grey ring just inside very bright stars is gone.
- The sky background and the grain look the same as before. Only the brightest parts of the image change.
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- Seestar results now take about 4 minutes instead of 10–12. Seestar saves its stacks at twice the sensor's real resolution. The pipeline now removes noise at the real resolution and then scales back up, so you get the same size image in less than half the time. S30 Pro and S50 Pro files are natively 4K and are processed at full size, as before.
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- Share a result. A finished image gets a link anyone can open — the before/after slider, the target name and how long you exposed for, and nothing that says who you are. Unshare takes it down again.
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- Keep your images in an account. Sign in with your email address: we send you a link, and opening it signs you in. There is no password. Everything you already made in this browser moves into the account, and you can open it from any device.
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- Dwarf 3 stacked FITS supported. Tested on one file so far — send us yours if it does something wrong.
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- Stars keep their natural colour: the stretch was pushing star cores toward red on nebula fields, so the pipeline now measures them on the finished image and corrects the drift.
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- Newer Seestar firmware exports pre-stretched files, and treating one as raw data produced magenta star cores. They are now detected.
- On a detected file, white balance steps aside and the stretch keeps the tone curve it arrived with.
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- The stretch adapts to the frame: a nebula that fills the field is no longer crushed toward black to hit a target meant for empty sky.
- A gentle local-contrast pass on brightness only — dust lanes and galaxy arms stand out without shifting colours.
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- A lone raw sub now gets its colour data decoded, and mono captures no longer fail on colour-only steps.
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- Fixed 16-bit uploads rendering as solid white, and both exports now refuse to deliver a blank frame silently.
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- A darker sky: the stretch targets a deeper background — tighter stars, more contrast in bright detail.
- Measured end to end on four real captures. Faint nebulosity is unchanged — it was an exposure change, not a noise fix.
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- Better framing for raw subs: the crop is computed from the registration data — up to 1.4× more of the sensor kept on captures with field rotation.
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- Background subtraction and white-balance tuning.
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- Fixed a colour cast, tuned denoise strength, and added the before/after export that powers the comparison slider.
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- First version to run in the service. From here on, every job records the pipeline version that processed it.