Frequently asked questions

No. Image Enhance is optional and paid separately: one credit enhances one picture. The free copy includes 2 credits to try it, and any you have not used move onto your licence key when you buy. A licence key gets no free credits of its own. To see how many you have left, open Help in the app and choose View remaining credits.

Yes. Drop in a stacked FITS, XISF or TIFF from a Seestar or Dwarf, Siril, DeepSkyStacker, ASTAP, Astro Pixel Processor or PixInsight, and Akastroid does the rest: gradient removal, photometric color calibration against the star catalog, deconvolution, the stretch, sharpening, star handling and annotation. It reads the file to work out what it has been given: a 32-bit float stack is still linear, so it gets the full finishing pipeline, while an already-stretched 8 or 16-bit picture is treated as somebody's finished image and only touched up. Getting that wrong is how a stack comes out green and dark, so it is decided from the file rather than guessed from how bright the sky looks.

Point Akastroid at the folder your camera or smart telescope wrote and press Process. Nothing needs to be renamed, converted or configured first, and you do not need to know what the processing steps are. They are set from measurements of your frames and listed afterwards with the reason for each. If you would rather understand the workflow first, it is written out step by step on the How it works page.

No. If you have them, put them in folders called darks/ and flats/ next to your lights and Akastroid finds and applies them. If you don't, it says so once and carries on, and you still get an image.

No. Your frames are read, processed and written on your own machine, and nothing about them is ever uploaded. The application makes three kinds of network request, and none of them carries your images: an update check, which you can switch off under Help; a one-time report that this version opened successfully, behind the same switch; and a licence activation, only if you enter a key. With the update switch off and no key entered, it makes none at all. It works with the wifi off, and it would keep working if this website went away.

No. Stacking and processing never invent detail and use no generative AI. They measure your data and do arithmetic on it: which frames are sharp, how noisy the stack is, where the sky gradient sits, how far to stretch. The one learned part is our own noise reduction, a small model trained only on real captures that takes noise out and adds nothing.

Siril is excellent and will go further than Akastroid in expert hands. The difference is the learning curve: Siril expects you to know the sequence of operations and their parameters. Akastroid works those out, runs them, and tells you what it did. Measured on the public M42 LRGB dataset against Siril 1.4.4 in October 2026, star width on the mono stack was level (1.64 px against Siril's 1.67 px half-width), as was colour-channel alignment (0.17 px against 0.18 px median). Akastroid's mono star signal-to-noise was 0.90 to 0.92 of Siril's; it stacked 46 of the 51 frames where Siril used all 51. If you already know Siril you may not need this.

Yes. Point it at the folder of FITS files the Seestar saves. It reads the Bayer pattern, exposure, gain and pointing coordinates straight from the headers. Use version 1.3.13 or later: one folder can then hold frames taken with and without the light pollution filter (LP and IRCUT), and mosaic frames, which show another part of the sky, are set aside with a note saying how many.

Yes: Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF and DNG among others. It reads the sensor data with the black level removed and nothing else done to it, which is what stacking needs. A normal RAW converter's white balance and gamma are wrong for a stack of 60-second exposures.

Drop in a .ser or .avi capture. Akastroid grades every frame for sharpness, keeps the best, aligns them on the planet's disc in pieces to remove the atmosphere's local warping, corrects atmospheric dispersion and sharpens with wavelet layers you control. In most workflows that takes several separate programs.

A hundred-frame DSLR session takes under a minute on an M-series Mac. A 206-frame Seestar session measured 22 seconds, and 111 DSLR raws 70 seconds. A planetary capture of twenty-six thousand frames measured 82 seconds. Drizzle is the slow part: about 1,000 Seestar frames took 29 minutes with it on, and switching it off before the run makes that much shorter.

Stacking caches every registered frame on disk, roughly width × height × channels × 2 bytes each, so a 134-frame DSLR session is about 6.5 GB. Akastroid checks before it starts and, if there is not enough room, keeps the best frames that fit and tells you rather than failing part-way.

Yes. Email hello@akastroid.com within 14 days of purchase and we refund you in full, wherever you are, no questions asked. The money goes back to the original payment method, usually within 5 business days. On Pro Monthly the 14 days apply to the first payment. The refund policy has the details: akastroid.com/legal/refunds/

No. Pro is one payment, yours permanently. (If you would rather spread the cost, Pro Monthly is $29 a month, cancel any time; it works while it is paid for and then goes back to the free allowance.) Pro and Pro Studio both include every future version, version 2 and later included; they differ only in the number of computers. A Pro licence bought from 19 to 23 October 2026 includes the releases of the year after its purchase, as it was sold, and the version you have keeps working after that.

Not a licence bought from 20 October 2026. Pro and Pro Monthly cover one computer and Pro Studio two, the first ones you activate the key on, and the licence cannot be moved to another computer. Windows and Linux on the same laptop count as two computers, so a dual-boot laptop needs Pro Studio. The same key works with the Mac, Windows and Linux builds, so that one computer can run any of them. If the computer is replaced or breaks, write to hello@akastroid.com and we will reset the licence so you can activate it on the new one. A licence bought before 20 October 2026 keeps what it was sold with: Pro covers one computer and Pro Studio two, and you can deactivate a computer in Akastroid, or release every computer from your account page, and activate on another one, as often as you like.

The free version has no time limit. Every feature works: deep sky, planets, the Moon and the Sun, drizzle, mosaic stitching, photometric color calibration, annotation, gift artwork and 16-bit export. It is capped at five processing runs (deep-sky or planetary) and two exports. A run that fails or that you cancel does not count (version 1.3.13 and later). A licence removes both limits.

macOS asks once for each protected folder an app opens, such as Desktop, Documents or Downloads. Since version 1.3.14 Akastroid is signed and notarised by Apple, so your answer carries over to new versions. If you used an older version, you may be asked once more after updating. Keeping Akastroid in Applications rather than on the Desktop also means fewer of these questions.

They are your photographs. Akastroid claims nothing.