Astrophotography Software for Beginners: What to Start With

A lot of people leave this hobby the same way, and the sky has little to do with it.

They buy a telescope. They get a first night of frames. They ask what software to use and are told, correctly, that PixInsight is the best. They install it, open a folder of FITS, look at an interface that assumes they already know what a screen transfer function is, and close it. Three months later the telescope is in a cupboard and the conclusion is “astrophotography is harder than I thought”.

Usually the equipment and the data were both fine. The advice was correct, it was just given to the wrong person.

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.

A better question to ask first

The usual framing is “which program is best”. That question has an answer and the answer is useless to a beginner, because the best program is best in the hands of somebody who has already spent months learning it.

The more useful question is what a program requires you to know before it gives you anything at all.

Every astrophotography program sits somewhere on that scale. For your first six months, where it sits matters more than any difference in output quality.

What each one asks of you

DeepSkyStacker. Free, Windows only. Asks you to load your lights, darks, flats and bias separately, pick a stacking method and a kappa value, and then finish the result somewhere else, because it stops at the integration. What comes out of it looks like a flat gray rectangle to anyone who has not been warned, and the step that turns that into a photograph is not in the program. Reasonable if you already have Photoshop skills. Bewildering if you do not.

Siril. Free, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, very good, and actively developed. Asks you to know the sequence of operations and the parameters for each: which registration method, which rejection algorithm, what degree of background extraction, how far to stretch. Its scripts automate the middle of that for one-shot color cameras, which is a real help. If budget is your constraint and you enjoy learning tools, this is what I would recommend, and it costs nothing.

PixInsight. Paid, and the deepest tool in the field by a distance. Asks for months. The interface predates modern conventions, the documentation assumes signal processing vocabulary, and the depth that makes it so capable is also what makes it slow to learn. People who have learned it say it was worth it, and I believe them. It is still the wrong first purchase for most people, because you cannot learn processing from an image you never produced.

AutoStakkert, RegiStax, PIPP, WinJUPOS. Planetary. Four programs, individually approachable, and the sequence between them is where people get lost: which order, which intermediate format, why the result is soft when every step looked fine.

Akastroid. We make it, so read this with that in mind. You give it a folder of frames. The settings listed above are measured from the frames rather than asked for, and the processing log shows what was chosen and why. The free version has every feature, with one export to try it on.

What “measured instead of asked” means

This is worth understanding whichever program you choose, because it explains what those parameters are.

Almost none of the settings you are asked for are matters of taste. Which rejection method suits a stack is a function of how many frames you have and how much they vary, and both can be counted. How hard to deconvolve depends on your measured star width and signal-to-noise, both of which can be measured. Whether drizzle helps depends on whether your frames were dithered, which is recorded in the frames. Where the black point belongs depends on what fraction of the image is sky, which on a wide field is around 98%. The generic default is roughly three times too high, which is why beginner images so often have a gray background.

An experienced imager is not making artistic choices at those points. They are estimating measurements by eye, and after years of practice they estimate well. That is the skill a beginner is asked to have before getting a first result, and it helps to know it is estimation rather than taste.

A practical order to do things in

1. Get a result from your first session, any result. Not a good one. A real one, from your own frames, so you have been from sky to photograph once. Everything after this is easier because you have an image to improve.
2. Learn what one step does, by changing it. Stretch too far and see what happens to the background. Turn off the gradient removal and see what the sky was doing. This is much faster than reading about it.
3. Fix your capture, not your processing. Almost every beginner image is limited by the frames rather than the software: focus, tracking, no flats, subs too short. See diagnosing bad astrophotos and what darks, flats and bias do.
4. Then, if you want depth, go and learn PixInsight or Siril properly. By this point you know what the operations are for, and the learning goes much faster.

Most people who give up did step four first.

What to start with

• Most beginners: Akastroid. One app for every subject, nothing to configure, and a finished picture from your own frames on the first night.
• You are on a Mac: DeepSkyStacker is not an option. Akastroid, or Siril if you want free.
• Budget is the constraint and you like learning tools: Siril. Free, good, and the community around it is helpful.
• You have a smart telescope (Seestar, Dwarf, Vespera): something that reads the FITS folder directly without configuration. See the Seestar guide.
• You shoot planets: the four-program chain works and is free; one application that does the same job is worth the money mostly for the time.
• You are certain you want to master processing as its own craft: PixInsight, and accept the months.

Summary

The best astrophotography software for a beginner is whichever one gets you a finished image from your own data in the first week. Quick results do not matter more than good ones, but it is hard to improve at something you have never finished once.

If you want to see the workflow before choosing anything, every step from raw frames to a finished image is written out here, along with what each step takes to learn.