Apple released its film for the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display today, and Meridian is in it. About 18 seconds in, the camera moves across the new display while Meridian shows my image of M81, Bode's Galaxy, in its catalog view.
The galaxy on that screen is one of mine. I captured M81 from a remote observatory and processed it on the Mac, and it sits in Meridian next to every other target I've imaged since 2017.
Watch the film
You can watch Apple's full film on YouTube:
Meridian appears at about 0:18.
About the new MacBook Pro
The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is Apple's first Mac with Touch. It's a pro laptop built to travel, and the display is the headline: a tandem OLED panel at 14.2 or 16.3 inches, with up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and ProMotion from 10Hz to 120Hz. The touch sensor is built into the display panel itself, and macOS translates touches into clicks, so existing Mac apps work with Touch from day one.
Here's what else Apple lists:
- M5 Pro (up to 18-core CPU, up to 20-core GPU) or M5 Max (18-core CPU, up to 40-core GPU)
- Up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 16TB of storage
- Up to 24 hours of battery life
- 3 pounds for the 14-inch, 4 pounds for the 16-inch
- Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack
- From $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch, available November 6
For deep-sky work, that means a true black background and a lot of headroom for bright stars and galaxy cores, in a machine you can take to a dark site. I expect it to run the full Mac Observatory suite well.
What Meridian does
Meridian is a deep-sky imaging catalog for the Mac. Point it at your folders and drives and it reads the FITS and XISF headers in every frame, matches the coordinates against 41,731 cataloged objects, and works out what you photographed, even when folder names drift. Years of subs, calibration frames and finished images become one catalog you can browse, search and plan from.
It never changes your files, and nothing leaves your Mac. Your targets also show up in Spotlight, so finding every session of a target is one keystroke.
Meridian is $34.99 on the Mac App Store, a one-time purchase with Family Sharing, for macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
“Many thanks to the team at Apple that reached out to include Meridian in their announcement.”
Andrew Burwell