AutoStakkert for Mac: There Isn't One. What Planetary Imagers Use Instead

AutoStakkert has no Mac version. AutoStakkert!3 and !4 are Windows programs, and there is no announced macOS build.

That matters because AutoStakkert is the stacker nearly every planetary tutorial is built around: capture in FireCapture or SharpCap, trim in PIPP, stack in AutoStakkert, sharpen in RegiStax. Two of those four are Windows-only.

Our recommendation

For most people the answer is Akastroid: one app for deep sky, planets, the Moon and the Sun, on Mac, Windows and Linux. You drop in your frames and it grades, calibrates, stacks, removes the gradient, calibrates the colour and sharpens, with no settings to choose. The usual route needs four to six separate programs for the same result.

On the same Orion stack, Akastroid’s automatic finish measured a signal-to-noise of 402 against 87 for Siril’s standard workflow, with a sky gradient of 2.6% against 21.6% (the full comparison). It is free to try on your own data.

Choose PixInsight if you want to control every step by hand and will spend months learning it, or Siril if you want free software and are happy to learn the steps. The rest of this guide compares them in detail.

Why running it under Wine is a last resort

AutoStakkert does run under Wine on a Mac. We run it that way ourselves to compare against it, and this is what it involves.

Setup takes a while. Homebrew disabled the WineHQ casks in September 2026, Whisky needs a runtime you source separately, and on Apple silicon the Windows code is translated twice. Expect an evening before the first stack.

It is slow. Planetary stacking is thousands of frames of alignment. Under translation, a capture that stacks in a minute on a native program can take several.

A virtual machine with Windows works reliably, but it means buying and maintaining Windows to stack a video.

It is worth doing if you need AutoStakkert itself, for example to match an existing workflow exactly. If you just want a stacked planet, it is a lot of effort.

What stacks planetary video natively on macOS

Lynkeos. Free, open source, a native Mac application for years. Aligns and stacks SER and AVI, with basic sharpening. Development is slow, and the interface expects you to know the lucky-imaging steps.

Planetary System Stacker (PSS). Free, open source, written in Python, so it runs on macOS with some setup. Its multi-point alignment is modelled on AutoStakkert’s and it is a capable stacker. It stops at the stack; sharpening is a separate program.

Siril. Free, native on Apple silicon, and it opens SER. It is built for deep sky first: planetary video is possible, but it is not the tool planetary imagers reach for, and its tutorials assume you already know the lucky-imaging steps.

Akastroid. What we make. Native on Apple silicon and Intel. It grades every frame, aligns on multiple points across the disc, stacks, corrects atmospheric dispersion and sharpens with wavelets in one window, and it does the Moon and deep sky too. We measured it against AutoStakkert on the same eight captures: as a stacker it is level, with the same detail and less noise on every one. It was behind on red and blue for one-shot-colour cameras until September 2026, when the stacker started integrating each colour from its own sensor sites. Every channel now measures level. The full numbers are on the AutoStakkert comparison.

Moving from an AutoStakkert workflow

• Captures open as they are. SER and AVI from FireCapture, SharpCap or ASICap, with no conversion.
• “Percentage of frames to stack” is the AutoStakkert question. Akastroid measures every frame and stacks all the ones worth keeping; on the captures we tested, stacking everything usable beat any fixed cut.
• Alignment points are placed automatically across the disc, the equivalent of AutoStakkert’s automatic AP grid.
• The RegiStax step is built in. Wavelet sharpening runs after the stack, with the same per-scale sliders if you want to adjust them. See RegiStax on a Mac.

Try Akastroid on macOS · Akastroid vs AutoStakkert, measured · Planetary stacking software · All the Mac options