A record of what each installed release (Releases\RASTA-Setup-<version>.exe, built via
scripts\Build-Release.ps1) actually contains. One section per version, newest first. The
version number matches <Version> in Directory.Build.props and the corresponding vX.Y.Z
git tag.
- Plan view: a Radio Sky map. Plan is now built around a zenith-centered Alt/Az hemisphere map instead of a plain numeric form, so a plan can be seen and validated before it's ever run for real: the background is rendered from real HI4PI all-sky neutral-hydrogen survey data (not an analytic approximation), capture points are previewed all-at-once or as an animation by running through the real sweep-ordering/horizon-validation pipeline, there's a toggle between the dome's Alt/Az reference frame and a live RA/Dec grid, freeform region drawing for Equatorial plans, and a right-click "Slew & Capture Here" straight from the map. Capture-point dots are now sized to the antenna's actual beamwidth instead of a fixed pixel size. Plan needs neither an SDR nor a mount connected any more, so it can be used fully offline.
- Mosaic: Zenith Dome and 3D Dome views. A new "Zenith Dome" tab shows every processed position's live Az/El at a chosen moment as a zenith-centered dome, the way a naked-eye sky chart is drawn. The old spherical-globe "3D Surface" tab is replaced by a "3D Dome" extrusion view built on that same shared dome geometry, with zero-anchored height/colour and an optional Delaunay-triangulated surface fitted through the points, plus click-to-select linking a point back to its row in the Positions grid.
- Mosaic: LAB Survey test data. A folder of LAB Survey (Leiden/Argentine/Bonn Galactic HI Survey) profile files is now detected automatically and processed the same way as a real RASTA session, letting the Sky Mosaic/3D Dome/Zenith Dome views be exercised against real, richly-varying sky data without needing actual observing time. New PowerShell scripts fetch and generate test grids for this.
- Site settings usable without a mount. Latitude/longitude/elevation - plus new dish diameter/focal length antenna fields, feeding an estimated beamwidth - can be set and persist before any mount is ever connected; connecting a mount now only prompts to reconcile if its own reported site actually disagrees with what's already set.
- Sweep points ordered by urgency. A sweep now visits whichever remaining point is closest to setting below the horizon limit first, rather than simply whichever is highest in the sky right now - so a target that's about to be lost isn't stranded behind higher-but-not-urgent points. A point that can't clear the horizon limit for its own dwell is skipped individually (with a warning) instead of cancelling the whole plan.
- Fixed a real bug in
AstronomyUtils.HorizontalToEquatorial(a scale mismatch in its hour-angle recovery, off by several to tens of degrees away from the meridian/equator) and a related azimuth-quadrant ambiguity inEquatorialToHorizontal(a bare Acos can't tell an object rising from one setting). Both fed the Plan/Mosaic sky maps, the HI4PI background sampling, cold-sky candidate selection, and AltAz FITS metadata's RA/Dec reconstruction, so the fix reaches well beyond where each was first noticed. - Region-mode sweep grids are now built in a pole-safe tangent-plane projection instead of raw RA/Dec, fixing badly distorted grids for any region drawn near due-North from a mid/high-latitude site.
- Fixed a data-binding crash ("Cannot find governing FrameworkElement") on the Plan sky map's capture-point dots.
- Default centre frequency reverted to 1420.4058 MHz (the HI rest frequency itself).
- Plan sky map dots get a two-tone (white/black) halo so they stay visible against the HI4PI background regardless of its colour underneath.
- Mosaic's colour ramp switched to a Radio Eyes-style visible-spectrum scale (deep blue through to red), shared by the 2D heatmap and 3D Dome.
- New Range / New Region buttons replace a single ambiguous "New Plan" button; the Plan editor's Range/Region toggle is now display-only, since geometry mode is fixed by whichever button created the plan.
- Target FFT Size no longer aliases the spectrum. Downscaling used to shrink the raw IQ
before the FFT (
IqDownscaler), which was a real bug: block-averaging time-domain samples and then FFT-ing the shorter result is decimation, and decimating in time aliases the spectrum — each output bin ended up combining a native bin with one a whole output-length away (e.g. a 4096→2048 downscale folded the middle of the band together with its far edge) instead of averaging nearby frequencies. A lower Target FFT Size used to make a spectrum noisier and erase its bandpass shape rather than smoothing it. Replaced withSpectrumBinner, which averages adjacent bins of the already-computed, native-resolution spectrum instead — correct, and it fixes Mosaic's own Target FFT Size too. - Target FFT Size and Smooth now also work on the standalone Baseline-only/Capture-only charts (previously ignored, always native/unsmoothed) — lets a single file's own noise be judged before it's ever combined with its counterpart.
- The SKAO TTRT cross-check no longer pre-shrinks IQ data to 256 samples/frame; it now feeds native-rate IQ straight to the reference algorithm, which is what it actually expects.
- Corrected stale documentation/comments describing the calibration baseline as a terminator reading — baseline capture has used an automated cold-sky pointing for some time now; a terminator is only ever used for the separate gain-calibration step.
- Added explanatory tooltips to the Single Capture tab's Spectrum Mode, Target FFT Size, Show dB, Smooth, Window, and Despike controls, aimed at people new to radio astronomy.
- Long tooltips now wrap into a sensibly-sized box instead of spanning the whole window.
- Added an app icon, a transparent splash screen, and a desktop shortcut to the installer.
First installer release (WiX MSI + Burn bootstrapper chaining the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime). Baseline feature set at this point:
- Four-stage workflow — Prepare → Plan → Capture → Visualise — driving an ASCOM Alpaca telescope mount and an RTL-SDR receiver.
- Three-step calibration flow (Load Last Calibration / Calibrate Device Gain / Capture Baseline), baselining against an automatically-selected cold-sky pointing rather than a terminator, to avoid the spurious edge-of-band hump a terminator baseline leaves behind.
- FFT-size-agnostic HI reduction pipeline (
HiStreamingPipeline): baseline division, continuum fit/subtraction, optional Savitzky–Golay/Moving-Average smoothing, optional narrowband-RFI despike, always-on receiver DC/LO-spike excision. - Sweep planning with elevation-optimised target ordering; Quick Capture for one-off dwells at the mount's current pointing.
- Visualise: HI (Frequency)/HI (Velocity)/SKAO TTRT/Bandpass Ratio spectrum modes, LSR Doppler correction, automatic multi-file dwell combination.
- Mosaic sky-map view: 2D heatmap and 3D height-field surface, RA/Dec or Az/El grid, line-strength and velocity metrics.
- App-wide unhandled-exception handling and graceful shutdown; hot-plug-aware SDR device handling; mount-disconnect recovery.
(Development before this point predates formal release tagging — see git log for the full
history.)