Akastroid
About me
Akash Astroverse
Hi, I'm Akash Aggarwal. I'm an amateur astrophotographer, and I built Akastroid because processing kept me from enjoying my own nights under the sky. On my channel, Akash Astroverse, I share those nights, from the telescope to the finished picture.
My own captures, stacked and finished in Akastroid. See the gallery
The channel came first
I built the application out of processing my own data, night after night, and some decisions follow from that. The processing runs on your own computer, because an observing site often has no signal. The free tier does not expire after a number of days, because a trial that runs out during a cloudy fortnight is no use.
Tested on my own captures
Every release has to pass tests built from my real data, not synthetic images: Orion and the Pleiades on a DSLR, M31, the Leo Triplet, Saturn and Jupiter on a planetary camera, the Moon at 4K. A change that measures worse on any of them does not ship, and the comparison pages report the measurements, including the ones where Akastroid loses.
The equipment
The telescopes and camera I took the pictures on this site with.
Celestron NexStar 6SE
A 150 mm Schmidt-Cassegrain on a computerised mount: the planets, the Moon and the brighter deep-sky objects.
Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ
A 130 mm Newtonian on an equatorial mount: wide deep-sky fields.
ZWO Seestar S50
A smart telescope: the Seestar sessions the smart-telescope processing is tuned on.
Nikon Coolpix 950
A compact camera, at the eyepiece.
What Akastroid does
Deep-sky stacking, planetary and lunar lucky imaging, mosaics, LRGB and narrowband composition, and annotation. It runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, on Windows and on Linux. The usual planetary chain (PIPP, AutoStakkert and RegiStax) is Windows-only.
macOS 12 Monterey or later, Apple silicon · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · Free to try, no account
Questions
Who is Akash Astroverse?
It is my astrophotography channel. I am Akash Aggarwal, and I also developed Akastroid, the desktop application this site is about.
Is Akash Astroverse the same as Akastroid?
They are my channel and my software. Akash Astroverse is where I film and explain my imaging. Akastroid is the application I process it with.
What does Akash Astroverse post?
Astrophotography: how I capture deep-sky objects, planets and the Moon, and what I do with that data afterwards. If you want to see Akastroid used on real captures before deciding whether to download it, the channel shows that.
How do I contact you?
Write to hello@akastroid.com and it comes straight to me, or message me on the channel or the Instagram and Facebook pages linked on this page. There is no support team in between.