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

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

That matters more than it sounds, 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.

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. Here is what that involves.

It is a setup project. 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 where it matters. 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, and means buying and maintaining Windows to stack a video.

Worth it if you need AutoStakkert itself - to match an existing workflow exactly. Not worth it just to get a stacked planet.

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 - the same detail, and quieter on every one. It is behind on red and blue for one-shot-colour cameras, which is the demosaic rather than the stacking. The full numbers are on the AutoStakkert comparison.

Moving from an AutoStakkert workflow

• Your captures open as they are. SER and AVI from FireCapture, SharpCap or ASICap - 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