The compositing quality story hit its capstone: smart auto-stretch with histogram analysis and per-channel controls (#688/#1206) is finally merged. Same day shipped the production Docker service-name defaults, hardened mosaic generation against enumeration, migrated to photutils 3.0, and cleared a 17-PR Dependabot backlog in one sitting.
Added saturation, vibrancy, and hue rotation controls to the composite pipeline — then immediately refactored compositeService to replace the 10+ positional parameters with an options object so adding the new controls wasn't a mess.
Three compositing UX wins — unsharp masking is now exposed in the pipeline, the Auto preset quietly runs a gentle sharpen, and the process step shows elapsed time as stages progress. Plus the usual Friday-night dependabot wave.
Part 2 of the exception infrastructure split — MAST exception subtypes landed — plus a small README update that actually matters for people finding the architecture docs.
Heavy security-infrastructure day — added the .NET exception hierarchy with centralized error middleware, security headers middleware on the gateway, gitleaks secret scanning in pre-commit and CI, plus the Claude Code GitHub workflow, a narrowed exception swallow in FITS save, and a full dependabot drop.
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.