The big multi-instrument compositing push. Started with per-channel feathering that couldn't fix the MIRI color palette shift, evolved to instrument-level blending, then realized signal fading destroys detail and invented color-contribution feathering — lerping between palette interpretations instead of fading signals.
The walkthrough generator moved to async export queues to stop timing out on large composites, and the channel-aware memory budget model got a conservative overhaul after OOM incidents on multi-channel composites.
The composite pipeline gained per-tile gain normalization to eliminate exposure-level grid artifacts, quality scoring via HTTP response headers, and HDR auto-stretch for extreme dynamic range targets like the Crab Nebula. Coverage-aware filter selection in the recipe engine now handles RA wraparound correctly.
Massive infrastructure day. The composite pipeline got streaming reprojection to stop loading entire FITS files into memory, auto-stretch parameters learned to compute themselves from channel statistics, and a security audit scrubbed hardcoded paths and AWS IDs from the codebase.
Big feature day — FOV overlap detection landed in the composite wizard, the auth flow got simplified to remove race-prone refresh triggers, and MIRI got its own stretch presets separate from NIRCAM.
Four PRs today, all circling the same issue: MAST's observation naming conventions are more complicated than they look, and our recipe engine was tripping over them.
Two bugs that had been quietly undermining trust in different parts of the system — 18 E2E tests silently skipping, and an export framing preview that was lying about what you'd get. Plus: the compliance-check skill got a ground-up rewrite.
Ten PRs. The headline features: coverage-aware pixel blending eliminates the hard edges where different instruments overlap, edge feathering smooths the FOV boundaries, and wallpaper-ready export adds rotation and resolution presets. Also shipped curated NASA-style recipes for famous targets, and rebuilt the Result step layout.
Seven PRs shipped — most of them fixing things that were silently wrong. Auto-crop removes the black borders that made every composite look like a padded square. Recipes now filter out non-science observations. And the composite pipeline finally routes through the authenticated API client like everything else should have from the start.
A two-part day. Morning: visual polish, bug fixes, and infrastructure cleanup. Afternoon: the recipe engine learned to look at the sky — cross-instrument composites now only combine observations that actually overlap. Plus a 52% main bundle reduction by lazy-loading page routes.