Release Date: November 21, 2025
Highlights
This release represents a major overhaul of the Journal system. Nova now supports full Project Management, allowing you to group multiple sessions into a single project (e.g., “Mosaic of M31” or “HaOIII data for Helix”). We have also added professional PDF Report generation for both individual sessions and complete projects.
Additionally, the main dashboard now supports Saved Views, allowing you to save your preferred sorting and tab configurations.
New Features
Projects & Advanced Journaling
- Project Support: You can now group multiple sessions into a dedicated Project. Track total integration time, goals, and status (In Progress, Completed, Abandoned) across multiple nights.
- PDF Reports: added the ability to generate and download beautiful PDF reports.
- Session Report: A summary of a single night’s imaging, including weather, gear, and notes.
- Project Report: A comprehensive overview of a target, aggregating data from all linked sessions.
- Rig Snapshots: When you add a session, Nova now takes a “snapshot” of your rig’s metrics at that moment. It automatically calculates and saves:
- Effective Focal Length (e.g., 386 mm)
- F-Ratio (e.g., f/4.8)
- Image Scale (e.g., 1.55 arcsec/pixel)
- Field of View (FOV) dimensions
- New Journal Layout: A redesigned Journal UI that groups sessions by Project and provides a clearer overview of your imaging history.
Dashboard Enhancements
- Saved Views: You can now save your preferred filter settings and sort orders on the Index page (e.g., “Sort by Altitude”, “Sort by Moon Separation”). Quickly switch between different viewing contexts.
Improvements & Fixes
- Guest User Experience: Improved navigation and interface elements for guest users (read-only mode).
- Outlook Cache Fix: Resolved an issue where the deep-sky outlook cache worker was not receiving the correct arguments, preventing background updates.
- Database Integrity: Enhanced the startup routines to automatically patch the database schema and migrate legacy session data to the new Project structure without data loss.
- Import/Export: Updated YAML export/import tools to include full Project metadata (goals, notes, status) to ensure full data portability.
- General Bug Fixes: Various stability improvements and UI tweaks.
Upgrade Notes for Self-Hosters
This version introduces a new projects table and adds several columns to the journal_sessions table.
- No manual action is required. Upon restarting the container/application, Nova will automatically detect the schema changes and migrate your existing data safely.
- Legacy “active objects” will be automatically converted into Projects.
