AkastroidWhat's changed.
Every release, described by what it does to your images rather than by version number.
Set black, midtones and white by hand — and one key, two computers
- The histogram is now editable. Drag the three handles under it to set the black point, the midtones and the white point directly; the shaded ends show exactly what is being clipped. Double-click a handle to put it back on automatic, or nudge it with the arrow keys. The handles sit on the same scale the curve is drawn on, so one parked against a feature acts on that feature.
- A licence now covers two computers rather than one, and the count is enforced instead of asked for. Entering a key makes one request to register the machine and never contacts us again — not on launch, not on export, not on any schedule. If we cannot be reached, Akastroid works normally for a fortnight and confirms itself when you are next online, because an outage of ours must not cost you software you have paid for.
- Deactivate this computer frees its place immediately. If a machine is gone — dead, wiped or sold — sign in at akastroid.com/account and release every computer without needing either of them.
- Your licence and your machines now appear on your account page. They did not before: a purchase was never linked to the account that made it, so signing in with the address that paid showed no licence at all.
- Builds are served from akastroid.com rather than a third party, with the SHA-256 published beside the download.
First public release
- Deep-sky processing: calibration, star-pattern registration with field rotation, and integration with sigma, Winsorized or linear-fit clipping chosen from your data.
- Planetary processing: frame grading, multi-point alignment across the disc, atmospheric dispersion correction and scale-aware wavelet sharpening.
- Deconvolution using a point spread function measured from your own stars, which declines to run when it would amplify noise rather than recover detail.
- Photometric colour calibration against a catalogue of half a million stars with measured colours.
- Sun and Milky Way support: limb-darkening removal and prominence recovery for solar frames; sky-and-foreground separation for nightscapes.
- Mosaic stitching, narrowband channel composition, and batch processing of a folder of sessions.
- Export to 16-bit TIFF, PNG, JPEG and FITS, with the unprocessed stack available separately.
Following along? The guides feed carries new writing, and release notes are posted here.