Release Date: December 19, 2025
Highlights
This release transforms Nova from a tracker into a visual discovery tool. The new Inspiration Tab provides a gallery view of currently observable targets, while Custom Imagery allows you to personalize your database with your own astrophotos. We have also overhauled the configuration system with Advanced Object Management, offering bulk actions and a powerful Duplicate Managerto keep your library clean.
Additionally, a highly requested Dark Theme is now available for better usability during imaging sessions.
New Features
Visual Discovery & Inspiration
- Night Explorer (Inspiration Tab): A new visual gallery displaying targets currently visible from your location. Instead of a data list, objects are presented as tiles prioritized by their current altitude, allowing you to browse potential targets visually.
- The easiest way to get started is to (re-) import the catalogs – they have been updated with image and text for the objects:
- Custom Imagery: You can also link your own astrophotos directly to objects in your database. These images appear in the Inspiration tab and the new “Inspiration” sub-tab within the object detail view.
Configuration & Management
- Advanced Object Management: The configuration interface has been overhauled to support bulk actions.
- Filtering: You can now filter objects by their catalog source (e.g., “Messier”) or other criteria such as magnitude or size.
- Bulk Enable/Disable: Select multiple items to enable or disable them from calculations without deleting them from your database.
- Duplicate Management: A dedicated tool scans your database for objects with coordinates within 2.5 arcminutes of each other (e.g., M101 and NGC 5457). You can review these pairs and merge them into a single entry, preserving your projects and journals.
- Dark Theme: The interface now supports a dark mode to reduce eye strain during night imaging sessions.
- Contextual Help: Help badges (?) have been added throughout the application to provide immediate documentation for specific features.
Improvements & Fixes
- Performance Optimization: Database queries for Horizon Points are now eager-loaded, improving page load times for users with complex horizon masks.
- Object Normalization: Enhanced the logic for object name normalization to handle formats like “SH2-155” versus “SH 2-155” more consistently.
Upgrade Notes
This version adds several new columns to the astro_objects table to support curation fields (images, credits).
- No manual action is required. Upon restarting the container/application, Nova will automatically detect the schema changes and apply the necessary patches safely.