The changelog

Every release, in plain English. If you reported a bug and it's fixed, you'll find it here by name. Newest first - and remember, the app tells you when a newer build than yours exists.

23 AUGUST 2026

StackingWizard Beta 2: big nights

Big nights, fixed at the root - the first beta kept every aligned frame in memory, so a 500-frame Seestar night could eat 40 GB and crawl into swap on Windows and Mac alike. Aligned frames now stream through a disk cache that is freed afterwards, memory stays flat whatever the frame count, and the final vote is a new sort-once algorithm running on every core. measured on the workshop PC: 187 Seestar frames in 2 minutes 31 seconds end to end, where the first beta needed over 8 minutes for the final vote on 60 frames alone. Thank you Dean, Marco, Paul, Volker, Alex, and the Dwarf 3 M31 reporter - your receipts drew the map.
Never silent again - grading, aligning and the final vote each show a measured time left. The "half a minute or so" line was a lie at 521 frames and is gone. A Stop button stands while stacking.
Stricter alignment - six stars must agree before a frame is placed (four-star fits stacked extra galaxy cores on a Dwarf 3 M31 night); a frame gets a second, harder look before it is given up; frames a Dwarf itself marked "failed_" never lead the stack.
Small things you asked for - the copy-the-receipts button sits in the card where no window width can hide it; previews fit the panel (portrait Seestar frames showed as a zoomed crop); saved names carry the frame count; "stacked", not "master", in the header; combining leaves out a stack that shares under half the field instead of shrinking your result to a strip; grading folds frames that arrive at a different bit-scale (the S30 Pro "300% sky" frames) before any verdict.
Known, and next - the Looking Glass list struggles past about 500 frames (grading itself is fine; a lighter list is next), then the uncropped/union canvas and a calibration library. Defender still frowns at unsigned betas: the false-positive report for this build is filed and signing is in progress.

22 AUGUST 2026

StackingWizard: the public beta opens

A new wizard joins the family - StackingWizard turns a night of telescope frames into a finished stack, simply: point it at the folder, the wizard sorts lights from darks and flats by their headers, grades every sub, aligns and stacks the keepers live, and hands the result to AstroWizard with one gold button. Free for everyone, forever - and very much a beta, with the rough edges to prove it.
Four steps, in order - The Pile, The Looking Glass, The Stack, The Handoff. No settings to learn; the wizard picks, you look, and every decision leaves a receipt.
Already got stacked files or masters? - several sessions of one target from the same rig combine into one deeper stack, smart-telescope nightly saves very much included. The wizard even notices when two stacks are secretly the same data, and politely declines.
Windows and Apple Silicon Macs tonight - Intel Macs and Linux follow. Get it from the StackingWizard page.
Found something odd? - press "copy the receipts" on The Stack page and email the lot to wizard@lukomatico.com. Every report makes the wizard wiser, and beta reporters are remembered.

21 AUGUST 2026

Badges and Bundles

AstroWizard introduces itself to RC-Astro - every call to the XTerminators now carries the app's name and build (Russ Croman's own request), so if you ever write to RC-Astro support they can see exactly which integration your machine runs. Newer CLIs only - older ones are left undisturbed.
Kinder words when RC-Astro is missing - the message now points to the stand-alone tool at rc-astro.com instead of just the Settings path. A field note from the Croman household, with thanks.
Licence troubles say so - when an XTerminator declines to run because it isn't activated, the top line now says exactly that, and where the 🔑 lives. No more generic "execution failed" for a licence matter.
No terminal required, ever - activate your RC-Astro licences and update the RC-Astro tools from inside AstroWizard. One button each, in ⚙ Settings & Help: 🔑 view or activate licences, ⬆ fetch the newest build with RC-Astro's own updater. Simple buttons, no command line.
The Bundle wears gold - the RC-Astro buttons found their colours, and the best-value bundle now says it is one.
The wall rides at 404 lines - forty-one wizards inducted since Tuesday. Welcome, every one of you.

18 AUGUST 2026 · REV B

Same day, sharper tools

The colour switch minds its own business - on finished, stretched images the "image looks all one colour?" flip no longer softens the colours you committed on screen. View only - your files were always true - but the canvas now agrees with your Curves.
Resizing mid-grid behaves - changing the window size while the depth grid is open now closes it cleanly; one click reopens it at the new size.
Failed loads fail honestly - a TIFF or XISF that cannot be read no longer half-opens a session.
The wall rides at 363 lines - tonight's inductions aboard the same day they were made.

18 AUGUST 2026

Doors and Dials

Open with AstroWizard - drag a FITS onto the app, or right-click and Open with, and it loads itself. Groundwork for broader tests of StackingWizard - the wizard's own stacking app, built from the ground up, taking its first steps in the workshop now. More on that when it's ready.
The depth grid, redesigned - two honest rows on the Big Stretch: the classic stretches with their dial above, the deep stretches with theirs below. Soft has retired after an unclicked career - Custom ×50 recreates its look exactly for anyone who misses it.
Deep dialing, both moods, one slider - the new Custom deep pane carries its own sky dial and a small keep colours tick: flip it and the pane re-solves on the spot, holding your star colours or equalizing your channels - honouring the colour choice you made at the start, at last.
Dials live with their panes - the grid's sliders now dock to the bottom edge of their own previews at any window size, instead of floating in the space between.
The colour switch works on stretched images too - flip "image looks all one colour?" on an already-stretched picture and the channels equalize in the view - a pure cast fix now, no sneaky brightening.
JPEG saves a touch richer - export quality rises a notch, still a fraction of the old file sizes, with more headroom for anyone who edits your image after you share it.
The wall rides at 350 lines - 334 wizards honoured, each seated once in their highest hall.

15 AUGUST 2026

The Quiet Cures

Blank previews heal themselves - if the screen renders pure white or black while your data underneath is fine, the wizard re-anchors the view from fresh statistics and says so in the console. Your image was never broken; now the preview knows it too.
Silent crashes get caught - GraXpert failures that die without printing a word now trigger the automatic CPU retry too, and older StarNet2 builds that refuse the progress flag get a plain retry that still separates the stars.
Star tools after Undo - running the star engines again after an Undo no longer trips over their own earlier files.
Saving leads with JPEG - the save dialog now offers JPEG first at a fraction of the old file size, star colours untouched, because a finished image wants sharing. FITS masters stay one click away.
Update RC-Astro from Settings - one button runs the official updater; no terminal needed.
The Stretch Wizard stands alone - manual stretches fold away behind one click on the Big Stretch step, so the guided path is unmissable and the classic buttons remain for those who know their own way.
Seestar stacks recognised on load - the right profile sets itself from the file’s own header.
A dozen smaller kindnesses - Save Starless offered whenever stars were separated, copied consoles note when a newer build exists, the Fellowship banner steps aside on narrow screens, the two Hubble mix buttons explain themselves on hover, and pre-stretched data displays true on Final Polish.
The wall rides at 309 lines - the biggest induction wave yet, every name aboard.

12 AUGUST 2026

Four Platforms

Intel Macs join the family - a native build for pre-Apple-Silicon Macs (2020 and earlier), field-tested on the wizard’s own old MacBook. Same app, same steps, fourth platform.
Graphics crashes cure themselves - if GraXpert’s hardware acceleration fails on your machine (older graphics cards, mostly), AstroWizard now retries on the CPU automatically and remembers your machine prefers it. Re-pick the GraXpert path in Settings if you ever upgrade and want acceleration back.
The white-screen mystery, solved - if GraXpert was set to save in 16-bit, its results came back in a range that washed the whole preview white. Engine results are now range-checked like every loaded file, whatever your GraXpert settings.
The wall rides at 256 lines - every name from the wave, aboard and remembered.

10 AUGUST 2026

The Library Opens

The Wizard’s Library is open - free practice skies from the wizard’s own telescopes: twelve volumes across four shelves, from first-light galaxies to the Troublesome Tomes. And there’s a 📚 door right on Step 1, for anyone with a cloudy fortnight and nothing to load.
Star Colour joins Replace Stars - a second slider that deepens the colour of your returned stars before they land: golds go golder, blues bluer, brightness stays put. A supporter’s “turbo charge button” ask, granted - live-previewed like everything on that page.
StarNet2 speaks when it stumbles - its own error messages now appear in the console instead of a silent “failed”, and instant failures get honest first aid (driver, the free Microsoft C++ runtime, antivirus - the usual three suspects, named).
Per-engine GPU cures - when a graphics chip gives up mid-run, the console now speaks the right cure for the engine that fell, instead of one-size-fits-none advice.
Settings learns StarNet2 properly - it joined the numbered setup list with its own free-download button, beside GraXpert’s.
The engines take a bow - the GraXpert team, Mikita Misiura (StarNet2) and Russ Croman (RC-Astro) join the Acknowledgements, links and all. The humans made the wizard; these three make much of the magic it conducts.
The friendly fine print - the app now carries its © line and plain-English terms: free for personal use forever, genuine copies from this page, no re-selling or re-packaging. Kindly meant, kindly worded.
The wall grew mightily - this build carries every name inducted through the launch wave. Welcome, all of you.

7 AUGUST 2026 · REV B

Same day, small truths

A text clip fixed on the Image-Saved window - the kindness lines now read in full at default size.
Downloaded the Mac or Linux build in the first hour of release? Those early files were missing the compressed-image codecs StarNet2’s output needs - this revision makes certain everyone has them. (Windows was never affected, and later Mac/Linux downloads already had the fix - if that’s you, this update is just the text fix and you’re free to skip it.)

7 AUGUST 2026

Stars for Everyone

⭐ Star removal is now FREE for everyone. StarNet2 - Mikita Misiura’s free star-removal neural net - joins AstroWizard as a fully supported engine beside StarXTerminator. Install the free StarNet2 command-line tool (starnetastro.com), and AstroWizard finds it automatically in the standard spot. The honest hierarchy is printed right on the card: SXT strongly preferred if you have it - StarNet2 is the free path, and it does a fine job. You kept asking for this one, loudly and often - here it is.
AstroWizard now does the star maths itself. For every engine, the app computes both star layers from your own image - so Replace Stars is mathematically exact whichever remover ran, and it gains a choice of blends: Exact (returns your stars precisely, to the last decimal) and Soft (the classic PixInsight-style screen blend - gentler over bright areas, never clips). Both preview live. The brightness dial also learned its safe floor: below 0.6 the returned stars could sink beneath a bright nebula entirely, so the dial now starts where every star survives.
📂 AstroWizard reads XISF. PixInsight’s native format walks straight in the front door - Load Image or the mono combiner, compressed or not, metadata intact - and converts safely to the usual working format, so the rest of the wizard never changes. Long asked-for (thank you Michael, and Derek whose real masters road-tested it) - welcome, PixInsight stackers.
💾 Save Stars Only. Beside Save Starless on the export page: just the separated stars, for your own blending recipes elsewhere (asked for by Mo Moore - whose request arrived attached to a tip; what a way to file a feature).
The palette mixes now name their data type - “OSC Dual-Band to Hubble” and “MONO SHO to Hubble” - so nobody reaches for the mono mix with a colour camera again.
The header grew up (and the Fellowship took the throne). A tidy two-row top bar on every screen size: zoom and undo/redo on the left, settings and compare on the right, and The Wizard’s Fellowship at true centre stage with the working-file status and progress bar tucked neatly beneath it. The hall itself now greets the curious with how names get up there - AstroWizard is founded on, and maintained by, kindness - and closes on gratitude.
Mac kindnesses: the quarantine cure line now includes the crucial sudo (thank you Jody, whose terminal wall of “Permission denied” taught us), and the Locate picker explains that apps look greyed out in a folder chooser - that’s macOS, not you (thank you Michael R.).
One honest note: the download grew by about 20 MB - that’s a complete image-codec library, so compressed TIFFs from any tool (StarNet2’s included) simply work everywhere.

5 AUGUST 2026

The Steady Eyepiece

Your screen no longer “goes crazy” after noise reduction. The preview aims its screen-stretch using the image’s own statistics - so when NXT or GraXpert wiped away the noise, the view would suddenly dig far deeper and light up like a different image. Nothing was ever wrong with your data, but the jump looked like damage and has worried people for months. Denoising and sharpening change noise, not brightness - so the preview now simply holds its aim through them: same view, suddenly cleaner. (Your real stretch at step 7 is untouched - this is purely the preview being steadier.)
The “already applied” note now tells the truth through Undo. Undo a step and the note vanishes along with the work; Redo and it honestly returns. It used to linger after an Undo, claiming work your image no longer contained - which could send you hunting for a problem that didn’t exist.
Final Polish greets you properly. Its buttons stack by design - so the scary “doubles the effect” warning is gone, replaced by a friendly note that blesses the layering.
All three caught by the wizard himself in a single night of field processing - and shipped before the sun came up, because holding back a fix this kind felt wrong.

4 AUGUST 2026

The Immortality Update

📜 The Wizard’s Fellowship - supporters’ names up in lights, inside the app, for all time. A rolling hall of every kind soul who keeps AstroWizard free: legendary supporters, the whole fellowship, and the newest members right at the top. Scroll it by hand or let it roll - and the top-bar button raises a toast to a random member now and then. Tips to the coinpurse join the wall (here and in the app) forever; Patreon and channel members are celebrated regularly in video credits - and welcome on the wall too, just say the word. Bought an RC-Astro tool through the app’s links? A mighty tip in itself - you belong there too, no receipt needed.
Replace Stars now restores your stars exactly - and shows you first. A live preview with full zoom and pan (asked for by rendenwow in the comments - great call) lets you dial star strength against your real image before committing. And an honest confession found during the build: ever since the feature was born, replaced stars came back very slightly dimmer than the originals. The wizard’s own before/after test caught it, we measured it, and the maths is now exact - 1.0 means a perfect restore, to the last decimal.
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y hotkeys for Undo and Redo, everywhere in the app (asked for by Greg - who also correctly diagnosed, from his own screenshots, why an image cropped after stretching was treated as unstretched; both shipped together).
Saving a JPEG saves a JPEG. The save dialog used to force a .fits extension whatever format you chose - so “save as JPEG” could try to overwrite your FITS master (caught by Chris in the comments, receipts and all). Whichever format you pick now supplies its own extension.
The framing page joined the flow: crop, shave, bin or rotate and the friendly “done here” banner appears instantly, with honest wording - framing ops are meant to stack. No more wondering why page 2 behaved differently (Chris again - good eyes).
When an engine can’t start, the app now tells you the true reason. Pointed at the PixInsight plug-in instead of the standalone CLI? A shortcut instead of the program? macOS quarantine? A laptop GPU giving up mid-run? Each case now prints its own plain-English cure right in the console - built from real support cases (thank you Joseph, and everyone who shared their logs).
Polish throughout: live previews survive “Hold to Compare”, settings survive upgrades from the very oldest builds, warmer words on every credits surface - and every public sentence now punctuates the way the wizard actually writes.

1 AUGUST 2026

The Stretch Wizard

🪄 The Stretch Wizard - the Big Stretch becomes two clicks, all by eye. Pick 1: which colours look right (two bright side-by-side previews). Pick 2: how deep - a grid of six live previews of your actual stretch: Soft, Normal, Aggressive, Deep, Deep keep-colours, and a Custom pane with its own dial. Click the look you love and that exact stretch is applied. Nobody leaves the wizard unstretched.
Synced zoom across every pane. Scroll on any preview and all of them dive into the same region, pivoting on your cursor; drag to wander. Compare how five different stretches treat one dust lane, live - the anchors are solved once and every zoomed view renders through the exact maths that clicking commits, so the previews cannot lie.
The Custom dial went live. Drag it in the grid and watch your factor render in real time against the presets; the “more…” button opens the full dialog as a remote - including Deep’s depth dial - while the grid stays on screen. The standalone ⚙ Custom button previews live on the main canvas too.
◀ Undo / Redo ▶ moved into the top bar - browser-style, one consistent home, scoped to the step you’re on (crossing steps uses the step numbers, which explain themselves). The red “Undo Last” buttons retired from every page: added functionality, removed clutter.
Curves grew two powers: an S channel - a true saturation curve (aim it at just the blues via the colour-family menu, brightness stays put) - and a Hold: Compare Original button on its preview.
Final Polish decluttered: the Tune and Custom-Strength dialogs now ride as small ⚙ buttons on their main buttons (the spellbook pattern), and the recommended mix wears a ✦ star no button colour can hide.
One honest question, as a last resort: heading into Final Polish with an image that looks unstretched now asks “stay & stretch, or continue?” - once per session, because bringing already-stretched data is a perfectly legal move.
Forged in five same-day field rounds by the wizard himself - every pane, caption, dial and warning in this release was road-tested on real dust before it shipped.

30 JULY 2026

The one where saving doesn’t end the session

Save as many times, in as many formats, as you like. Saving used to quietly wrap up your session behind the scenes - so saving a JPG and then trying a PNG could fail with a bare “Export failed” (reported in the comments, diagnosed by the wizard himself). Saving is now just saving: FITS for the archive, TIFF for printing, JPG for the group chat - then keep tweaking and save again. Undo even works after a save now.
💾 Save Starless Version. Asked for by Cyyberpunk in the comments barely a day ago: if you removed and replaced stars, the save page now also offers your image exactly as it was the moment before the stars returned - every mix, spell and curve you cast on the starless canvas included.
The Mac download is now a single zip. One unzip and there’s the app - no more zip-inside-a-zip surprise (thanks ascaniosobrero for flagging the confusion; the double-wrap was a packaging quirk on our side, and both layers always contained the same working app).
Small honesty upgrades: if an export fails, the message now tells you why; cancelling a save says so; and the post-save thank-you note appears once per session, not after every save.

23 JULY 2026 · REV I

The guidance era

Let the Wizard Guide You. Tell the app what you shot - one optional question on step 1 (colour camera? dualband filter? mono narrowband?) - and a gold trail of suggested clicks lights the way through every step, tuned to your data type. Follow the gold and you can’t get lost; ignore it and nothing nags. The mono combiner asks its own version of the question and even relabels its slots (“S → red, H → green, O → blue”) - the eternal which-file-goes-where question, answered where it’s asked.
The Wizard’s Way: see both, pick one. The gold-bordered button on the Big Stretch (and step 1) fills the screen with two live previews - linked and unlinked, side by side, neutrally labelled - and you simply click the one that looks right. On the stretch page the panes show your actual stretch both ways, so what you pick is exactly what you get; changing your mind afterwards re-applies instantly.
Wizard’s Curves - Colour Transmutation Spells. Five of the wizard’s own finishing curves as one-click stackable spells: Yellow to Copper & Gold, Blue to Teal, Dynamic Pop, Add Warmth, Cool Down. And every spell carries a 📖 button that opens the recipe inside the Curves window, fully editable - see the move, learn the move, make it yours.
Deep learned a second stance: “keep colours”. Classic Deep balances each channel itself (perfect for palettes and neutral skies); the new sibling digs just as deep while preserving your field’s true colour balance - golden Milky Way fields stay golden.
Normal is stronger now (150, the community-classic value). If you loved the gentler look, Custom 50 recreates it exactly - the Custom dial even marks the spot, and it now travels logarithmically so equal drag means equal visual change.
Auto Colour Balance learned some humility. On fields whose brightest stars are genuinely warm, it used to “correct” honest star colour into a full green cast (found the hard way, twice, on the same stubborn dust field). Corrections are now bounded to ±12% - a field’s true colour is not a calibration error - and a lurking maths bug that could blank a channel died in the same surgery.
Flow, everywhere: the step numbers up top are clickable; going back asks whether to rewind or keep your image as-is; finished steps offer a gold “Done here - Next Step”; already-applied steps warn before you double-run an AI tool; and the live console is on by default (it’s the app’s black box recorder - off-switch in Settings).
Every feature above was forged in marathon field-testing by the wizard himself - including debugging one of his own spells with the 📖 button an hour after it was built.

20 JULY 2026 · REV D

The one that digs deeper - and learns spells

The Deep Stretch. Last release we promised “round one” on very faint data - this is round two, and it’s a new engine. Instead of stretching harder (which, we measured, just brightens the sky), Deep anchors to your data: it solves its own white point, black point and strength from the image itself. Faint dust fields open fully, M51-class galaxies reveal their tidal halos, and bright cores stay unblown. Thanks to Lee Polikoff, whose unstretchable stack started this whole hunt. One honest note, printed right on the button: Deep digs up everything - a blotchy background means flaws in the data (flats, gradients), not a bug.
Wizard’s Curves - Colour Transmutation Spells. The wizard’s own finishing curves, straight from years of tutorials, now one-click and stackable: Yellow to Copper & Gold (faint yellows go copper, bright stay gold), Blue to Teal (cores pull to OIII teal), and Dynamic Pop (the gentle finishing S-curve). More spells will join the book over time.
Stretch wisdom, updated by experiment: with data that came through the earlier steps, stretch linked first - whatever your data type. The wizard A/B-tested his own long-taught “dualband wants unlinked” rule and the linked path won: deeper faint extensions, subtler colour. The tip lives right next to the switch now.
The stretch panel got simpler and smarter - Gentle retired (Custom covers it), the Custom dial now travels logarithmically with Normal and Aggressive marked on it in plain English, and if a stretch comes out genuinely flat, the app quietly points at Deep instead of leaving you guessing.
Navigate like you own the place: the step numbers up top are now clickable; going back asks whether to rewind your image or keep it as-is (crop a spot off a finished image without redoing five steps); and revisiting a step whose work is already in your image gets a clear “already applied” warning - no more accidental double-sharpening.
The live console is now on by default - it’s become the app’s black box recorder and bug-report machine (off-switch in Settings, if you must).

18 JULY 2026 · REV K

The all-night Mac stakeout

The real Mac bug, caught red-handed. Last release we woke the app from its nap - a true fix, but not the whole story. This time, armed with his own MacBook and Apple's diagnostic tools at 3am, Luke caught the deeper culprit in the act: on modern macOS, the app's “refresh the screen” call could get trapped re-drawing the window forever, so it never noticed GraXpert had finished - minutes ago. The interface looked alive; the part that watches for results wasn't. Fixed for good. Field numbers from the stakeout: background extraction 3 seconds, denoise 34 seconds - steps that used to “hang” for 20+ minutes. Mike Frazier's zoom-trick observation was the clue that cracked both chapters of this saga - poking the window was literally breaking the spell.
Denoising switched to GraXpert's 2.0.0 AI model on every platform - dramatically faster (about 40× on Apple Silicon), with output quality we couldn't tell apart from the newer model in side-by-side tests. Same model everywhere, so tutorials match your results whatever you run.
The Big Stretch reaches deeper into very faint stacks - data scaled into the bottom sliver of the numeric range (thanks to Lee Polikoff's file) used to come out as flat grey mud at any strength; the white-point logic now recognises real signal and opens it up. Honest note: this is round one. On the deepest data there's still more in the tank than a 1000-strength stretch pulls out - deeper reach is actively in the works.
One engine at a time, and the app says so - starting a second AI tool or changing steps mid-run now gets a friendly “hang tight” instead of a silent gamble with your working image. The console also narrates honestly: when the result file starts landing on disk, how big it's grown, and exactly when it's collected.
Quieter and tougher - the app no longer burns a full CPU core while waiting on an engine, never mistakes an old output file for a fresh one, and if its own plumbing ever fails, the full error prints right in the console ready to copy-paste to us.

17 JULY 2026 · REV B

The one where the app was asleep

The great Mac mystery, solved - the app was literally napping. macOS puts idle-looking apps into “App Nap”, and waiting for GraXpert is exactly when AstroWizard looks idle. GraXpert finished its work fine; AstroWizard dozed until you clicked something - which is why zooming or pressing Next Step made runs “suddenly complete”. The app now opts out of App Nap entirely. Full credit to Mike Frazier, whose zoom-trick observation cracked the case, and Rick, who called it exactly: “AstroWizard is not seeing the processing has completed.”
Stackers with messy headers can't break saves anymore - malformed header cards (like ASTAP's broken CALSTAT) are now repaired on the fly instead of aborting your crop. Thanks shreddybear.
macOS quarantine check: if GraXpert.app still carries the downloaded-app flag, the console now says so before running, with the exact one-line cure. Thanks Greg.
Windows shortcut trap: pointing Settings at a desktop shortcut (.lnk) instead of the real program now gets an orange warning and plain instructions, instead of a cryptic “not a valid win32 application”.

17 JULY 2026

The night-shift build

Linux previews work now. A library the image viewer needed wasn’t bundled, so Linux showed “No module named PIL._tkinter_finder” instead of your image. Fixed - with thanks to David Huff and johnsteed for the pinpoint reports.
The Linux file picker shows extensionless tools - no more renaming GraXpert to .sh just to select it.
RC-Astro no longer fails on decorated filenames. Files named like “NGC 6992, 2025-08-23, (CV)…” - which is most stacker exports - broke BlurXTerminator with a cryptic “cfitsio status 366”. AstroWizard now keeps its working filenames free of the characters that trigger it. Thanks Pawel!
Macs can finally pick GraXpert properly. The old file dialog often refused to select .app bundles - one tester’s path ended up pointing at macOS’s own “Apps” launcher, which AstroWizard then dutifully ran instead of GraXpert (thanks Brian - your report solved it, and you were never the problem). The Mac picker is now a folder chooser that accepts GraXpert.app or its folder, and any path that doesn’t look like the right tool shows orange in Settings with an explanation.

16 JULY 2026

The comment-section build

GraXpert on Macs now talks. Its progress and error messages were being silently swallowed on macOS - they now stream into the console live, and AstroWizard collects its finished result wherever and however it saves it (including Seestar-style .fit files). Built directly from console evidence sent in by launch-day testers - thank you Michael, Greg, Rob, and Brian.
The Settings window no longer multiplies when clicked repeatedly - which also fixes chosen paths appearing not to save.
One-click bug reports: the console gained a Copy button. If something misbehaves, Show Console → Copy → paste it in a comment.
Final noise touch-ups grew to a full set: Light and Normal strengths for both GraXpert and NXT (thanks JustJoe).
The Step-1 tip now matches the renamed “Image looks all one colour?” switch.
Version numbers finally agree everywhere - Finder, Settings, and this website all show the same build date.
Install guide covers macOS Sequoia (Apple removed the right-click → Open trick; it’s System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway now).

15 JULY 2026

The Mac fix, properly this time

The real cure for GraXpert hanging on Macs: it turns out GraXpert was finishing its work and saving the result all along - its process just never exited afterwards, so the progress bar bounced forever over a completed job. AstroWizard now watches for the finished file, collects it, and tidies up the leftover process itself. (Thanks to Greg for the detective work - his spot of a double file extension cracked the case.)
Output files no longer end up named .fits.fits.
Right-click now removes Curves points on Macs (Macs report right-clicks differently; Control-click works too).
The green-cast toggle is now “Image looks all one colour?” - it fixes red and blue casts just as well.
The preview no longer resizes when processing starts and ends - the progress bar has a permanent home.
Multi-pass noise reduction now shows “pass 1 of 2” as it works.
The Mac app’s version number now shows the build date instead of an eternal 1.0.0.

14 JULY 2026

The Apple Silicon fix

GraXpert no longer hangs on Apple Silicon Macs (all M-series chips). AstroWizard was accidentally passing its own internal library settings to GraXpert on launch; GraXpert loaded the wrong libraries and froze. Standalone GraXpert was never the problem - your setups were fine all along.
The window now fits smaller screens. On 13″ laptops the default window was wider than the display, hiding the Settings button off the right edge.

13 JULY 2026

Zero-click setup

AstroWizard now finds GraXpert and the RC-Astro tools by itself on standard installs - checked at every startup, so most people never need the Locate buttons at all.
Selected a folder instead of the program? It now works that out and finds the right file inside.
Clearer wording throughout setup: rc-astro is one file that runs all three tools - no need to hunt for three programs.

12 JULY 2026

The app that updates itself (politely)

Update notice: at startup AstroWizard checks this website for a newer build and shows a small banner if one exists. There's an off switch in Settings, and a promise printed next to it: nothing about you or your images is ever sent.
Your build date now shows in Settings - no more guessing which version you have.
ASTAP-stacked files no longer load as a pure white screen (different stacking programs use different pixel ranges; AstroWizard now handles them all).
Masked Saturation and Make it Pop are gentler per feedback, with a new Custom Strength dial for both (1.0× = the classic look).
GraXpert problems now explain themselves: its own messages appear in the console, crashes are detected and reported instead of bouncing the progress bar forever, and first-time-setup advice is offered when its AI models are missing.
PixInsight-stacked files no longer slow the RC-Astro tools to a crawl - huge file headers were choking them; AstroWizard now tidies these automatically (and the underlying bug was fixed by RC-Astro too, from our bug report).

9 JULY 2026

The stretch overhaul

New stretch engine: the linear preview adapts itself to your data, and the Gentle / Normal / Aggressive buttons were rebalanced to be meaningfully different (with honest labels).
Star-rich targets like the Pleiades now stretch properly instead of vanishing into black.
The green-cast toggle resets between images so it can't quietly discolour your next photo.
Tool windows (Curves, Tune, Mask Reach) resize with the window.
First solid Apple Silicon build (native, no Rosetta) with the Settings window fixed.

Before the website existed, the open beta ran through early July via YouTube community posts - highlights included the Curves editor with colour targeting, the narrowband Tune controls, star-removal workflows, and more fixes than anyone should admit to needing. History began properly when this page did.