Skotiq 8.1.0

Skotiq 8.1.0 adds multi-night master building, per-filter flat settings and drift recentering. It also fixes issues with guiding recovery, meridian flips and Science measurements.

Darkroom: from a night's capture to calibrated masters

• Organize work in Targets, Calibration, Activity and Edit, with direct links from session review and notifications.
• Build a target across multiple observing nights in a persistent background job. Review frame footprints, exclusions and the common crop before integration; export a field with uniform coverage.
• Prepare calibration, build targets, deliver results and send a morning message through the night-end workflow. Automation settings remain available in Darkroom.
• Build waiting bias, dark and flat batches from the calibration library. Explicitly selected flat batches wait for their matching calibration; changing approved calibration or the build plan invalidates affected cached integrations.
• Use floating-point calibration and flat normalization, bias-aware dark scaling when applicable, geometric coverage tracking, batch outlier rejection, star-signal weighting, and optional local normalization.
• Choose 1×, 2×, 3× or 4× drizzle, with configurable drizzle parameters. Higher scales increase processing time and storage; useful resolution gains depend on sampling, seeing and the input offsets.
• Export unclipped linear masters and RGB/LRGB composites, retain build receipts and frame decisions, and register saved masters in the library.
• Improved photometric draft color, gentler automatic noise reduction, channel-aware previews, saved recipe thumbnails, build progress, missing-file explanations, framing review and narrow-window layouts.
• Check working-disk space before integration; reuse registration work and reduce repeated reference-star detection.

Flat wizard and equipment interface

• Set gain and offset separately for every filter, so broadband and narrowband flats can match their lights in one run.
• More direct access to flat capture, a denser and clearer wizard layout, retained saved-frame results and a Build master flat action.
• Replace the tall collapsed-rail equipment block with a compact rig-status control that opens a full, readable equipment panel.

Sequencing, guiding and recovery

• Add a configurable angular-drift trigger, defaulting to 30 arcseconds from the first solved frame after initial centering. Saved frames are checked for drift, lost stars and obstructions.
• Recover mount tracking-limit stops through the meridian-flip controller, verify tracking and post-flip acquisition, record completed flips promptly, and identify the failing recovery step.
• Recover stalled PHD2 command connections; serialize guider restarts, wait for capture to end, preserve useful guide-star locks through settle timeouts, and keep dither/restart settling distinct.
• Reject frames affected by tracking loss or trails. Frame grading keeps filter and pier-side context, and the UI explains stopped guiding and rejected frames.
• Fix stale stop times and recovery banners, runs that skipped all targets, dawn/obstruction shutdown and calibration ordering, and autofocus baselines after failed sweeps.
• Reduce overnight polling bursts and avoid serial-port probing while a mount is connected. Prevent stale autofocus triggers and improve settle recovery.
• Quality and guiding triggers notify unless the operator configures them to stop the run; dawn behavior follows the sequence's own end-of-night policy.

Science, First Light and Your Sky

• Move CPU-heavy Science measurements off the UI isolate to keep the interface responsive as frames arrive.
• Use each captured frame's gain-dependent camera response and read noise, grade before publication to First Light/Your Sky, and support reprocessing recorded sessions with ordered outcome history.
• Correct full-WCS projection, parity, reference-pixel handling, catalog overlays, stored rotations and remote propagation; request ASTAP distortion terms and derive field size from the image when needed.
• Improve aperture photometry, comparison-star ensembles, per-filter zero points and transparency, band-specific transformations, and differential AAVSO export.
• Measure real gradients, sky noise, star-shape direction, PSF field structure and optical diagnostics; label sky-to-read-noise measurements accurately.
• First Light uses same-filter, star-flux-scaled references with artifact and subtraction-quality checks, confirms sources across frames, expires stale sightings and explains rejected scans. Chase respects an active sequence's ownership of the mount.
• Link moving-object detections in sky coordinates and offer MPC 80-column or ADES PSV export. Review detections before submitting them.
• Correct duplicate atlas counting, keep filters distinct, queue tile folds, batch index persistence and update remote maps incrementally. Add an atlas enable/disable setting.
• Narration uses settled, completed, usable measurements and the selected photometry target; improve analytics labels and constrained-panel layouts.

Downloads and upgrade notes

Windows x64, Linux x64 and Android APKs are available on the downloads page, with SHA-256 checksums. Each package identifies its source commit. Vendor camera SDKs are not redistributed in the desktop packages; retain/install the drivers required by your equipment.

This is version 8.1.0, build 30. Existing Science records and atlas contributions are unchanged by the update.

Complete change history

The complete commit appendix lists every commit since v8.0.0, including tests, refactoring, audit documentation and merges. Compare the releases.