AkastroidChangelog
What changed in each release, newest first.
Better results from phones and small cameras, and the Hubble look for dual-band stacks
- Akastroid now tells what took the picture: a phone, a compact or kit camera, a smart telescope or an astronomy camera, from the file's own details and from measuring the frames. A weak capture, such as a compressed phone video of a small planet or a single frame of a galaxy, gets extra care in the finish.
- A planet filmed on a phone no longer comes out as a burnt white disc. When the globe is clipped, it is brought down until the belts show, with its size and shape unchanged. On a phone video of Saturn the burnt share of the globe went from 26% to none.
- A single deep-sky frame, or two or three, is cleaned by a network of ours trained on our own sessions, and checked against the frame so that no star is added or lost.
- A one-shot-colour stack taken through a dual-band filter, such as a Seestar with its LP filter, can be finished in the Hubble look: hydrogen in gold, oxygen in blue, stars in their own colour. Choose it under Before you start; natural colour stays the default.
- A stack from frames that were not dithered no longer keeps hundreds of one-pixel red, green and blue dots. They are found and repaired, and stars are left alone.
- The report now says why each frame was left out, with the numbers, for example "Left out 28 frames for trailed or oval stars".
- If the Mac's file chooser fails to open, Akastroid says so instead of closing.
- The picture switch now sends the finished picture in full, with the telescope and camera names, the frame count and the exposure. Everyone is asked once more after updating, and the switch stays in Help.
Our own noise reduction and deblur, and fixes from the first weeks of use
- Deep-sky stacks are denoised by a network we trained on real sessions. It runs on every deep-sky stack, on the stretched picture, and leaves stars and colour alone. Grain fell 50 to 75% on the large-aperture sets (Horsehead 0.065 to 0.021, M42 0.061 to 0.016) and by about the same on Seestar sessions (M45 0.048 to 0.018, M31 0.041 to 0.019), with faint nebulosity standing 40 to 260% further above what noise is left.
- Stars and fine structure are deblurred by a second network of ours, trained on public-domain Hubble fields. It runs on the luminance of a large-aperture colour stack after the denoiser. On M42 the stars came out 21% narrower (2.34 to 1.84 px), with no ring round them and no change to the sky.
- A wide-field or fisheye session is recognised as one from the lens focal length or the image circle, not only from its file name, and finished as a nightscape. Until now a Milky Way set from a camera lens was finished as an unknown deep-sky object: dark, with the corners of a fisheye pulling the sky gradient.
- A nightscape with ground in it keeps its ground sharp. The sky is stacked from the sky alone, aligned on the stars; the ground is stacked as taken and joined along the horizon. The sky gradient is fitted on sky only, and a band of light-pollution colour just above the horizon is flattened.
- A camera with hot pixels no longer gets a stack of coloured dots. When the pattern of warm pixels is the same in every frame, it was taken for the star pattern and the frames were aligned on it, which smeared the real stars. The warm pixels are now found, repaired in every frame, and the frames aligned on real stars. Frames too weak to show stars are left out rather than aligned wrong.
- A folder of planet stills opened as deep sky is routed to planetary processing. A set of Saturn PNGs from a capture program was stacked as a deep-sky object and came out as one white blob.
- A small planet in a short capture is cropped to the planet and sharpened less. A tiny Saturn in a 4K video was finished uncropped and oversharpened.
- A phone video of a planet keeps its colour fringes in check. A phone's compressed colour is coarser than its brightness, and sharpening drew it into cyan and orange rims round the globe; the colour is now averaged over one camera pixel at the end, which on the capture that showed it took the rim's colour from 0.75 to 0.12 with the belts untouched.
- Opening an MP4 shows its progress and can be cancelled. On a long phone video the app looked frozen, and two people closed it while it was reading the file.
- Folders of PNG or JPEG frames are read, up to two levels down.
- When the free copy's runs are used up, the message says so plainly, names the monthly plan beside the one-time licence, and the links open.
- A weak set no longer stops at 'No matching star pattern'. When fewer than five frames register on their stars, or under one frame in five, the frames are aligned on the whole picture by correlation and the star positions settle the fit. Such a set used to stack a single frame.
- A mosaic built from raw, unstretched panels is no longer black. The panels are stretched before they are matched and joined, so a mosaic from calibrated FITS panels comes out at the brightness of a single stacked panel.
Pro Monthly
- Pro is now also sold month by month, at $11.99 a month. It is the same licence for one computer, renewed on the same date each month, and Akastroid fetches the renewed key by itself, so there is nothing to type again. Cancelled, it works to the end of the month you paid for and then goes back to the free allowance with your pictures and settings left as they are. The one-time licence is unchanged.
- The licence panel shows the date a monthly plan is paid until.
Mac builds signed by Apple, and a cleaner finish on short stacks
- The Mac app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised. It opens with no warning and no Terminal line, on Apple silicon and Intel. Windows is unchanged for now.
- A short stack is finished with less grain. When the subject stands only a few times above the sky noise, as on a Seestar session of an hour or less, denoising is doubled instead of eased. On three Seestar sessions (M45, M31 and the Veil) the grain in the finished picture fell by 17 to 44%, faint nebulosity stood 15 to 48% further above it, and the stars stayed the same size.
- A Seestar or Dwarf session is finished with less contrast on the sky. Local contrast is held at half on a small-aperture stack and the exposure is never lifted for thin signal there, so a flat sky stays a flat sky instead of showing its grain as texture. Set from the owner's own hand adjustment on a one-hour M51 session, so a beginner gets that result without touching a slider.
- A Seestar or Dwarf session is reconstructed from its Bayer frames with a sharper demosaic (Malvar, He and Cutler). Stars come out 11 to 12% narrower, faint structure stands 14 to 40% further above the grain, the grain itself is a quarter to a third lower, and more frames align (M45: 270 of 311 instead of 234). Planetary video and DSLR raw keep the old reconstruction, where it measured no gain.
- A Seestar or Dwarf session's sky has fewer specks. The denoiser flattened the sky and left single bright and dark pixels standing on it, which read as grain; a third of them are now removed without touching stars or faint detail. The rest, slightly larger blotches, are next.
- A Seestar session's sky keeps one colour across the frame. The light-pollution gradient was modelled as a plane when it needed a curve, and the stretch turned the half a percent left over into a 16% blue drift from one side to the other on one M45 session; it is now 2%.
- Identify objects works on a Seestar or Dwarf stack. It re-solved the finished picture and found too few catalogue stars in a small field; it now reuses the solve the run already made for colour calibration. On a Seestar M101 session it labels 11 objects where it labelled none.
- Export can write a small sensor's picture at twice the size. A Seestar or Dwarf finishes at 1080 x 1920 and reads as the smaller picture on a phone or a 4K screen next to the maker's 2160 x 3840; the new option writes it at that size, resampled in Lanczos3, and says plainly that it adds no detail.
- A colour planetary camera's video is reported as colour on the analysis card. It was debayered and finished in colour all along; the card said Mono.
- A Seestar's pointing is read in the epoch it was written in, so colour calibration against the star catalogue finds the field it was aimed at.
- The Sun is sharpened more: 39% more real fine detail in white light and 44% in hydrogen alpha, measured on the two halves of the same video finished separately.
- When almost nothing aligned and the stars are clearly trailed, the result card says so and what to do: shorter exposures, a tracking mount, or raw files.
- Help points to Diagnostics for the decision log; it named a tab that no longer exists.
MP4 video, cleaner overexposed planets, and Linux (beta)
- MP4 videos of a planet or the Moon open on Mac and Windows: a phone at the eyepiece, a compact camera, a smart telescope's own video. SER and AVI work as before.
- An overexposed planet finishes clean. When the camera clipped the disc, as it does on Venus, sharpening used to leave a bright ring and a colour fringe round the edge. On our Venus capture the rim went from 36% brighter than the disc beside it to 8%.
- Compose keeps the detail in a bright core. With a luminance layer, the centre of the Orion Nebula is no longer flattened, and stars are the same size as in the luminance master.
- Linux (beta): an AppImage and a .deb for Ubuntu 22.04 and later. It reads SER and AVI video; MP4 is not supported on Linux.
- The wording across the app is plainer, in all 36 languages.
- When a folder or a video cannot be opened, the app now sends a short note saying so (the kind of picture and how many files of which type, never a name), as it already did when a run finished or failed. Opening files, Compose and Mosaic runs, and a run the app closed in the middle of are noted too, and once a day an open copy says that it opened. All of it is under the same switches in Help, Check for updates, and none of it carries an image or a file name.
Clearer help when a stack goes wrong, and the October launch price
- When almost none of your frames could be aligned, Akastroid now says so: how many aligned out of how many, the usual causes (trailed stars, frames of different targets, a folder that mixes nights) and what to try. It used to quietly show a picture made from a single frame instead.
- A run like that no longer counts against the free copy's processing runs.
- A Seestar or Dwarf folder that still holds the telescope's own stacked image is explained: that file is left out because it is the telescope's stack, not a raw frame, and nothing is lost.
- Free copies show the October launch price: Akastroid Pro for $79 until 31 October.
- The free allowance can now be adjusted from our side without an app update.
No dark rings round stars, neutral narrowband stars, your whole frame kept
- The dark ring round every bright star in a deep-sky picture is gone. The enhancement now works round the stars instead of through them. On the Orion stack the ring under the forty brightest stars went from 13.8% below the sky to 1.7%, past Siril's 3.6% on the same pixels.
- Narrowband stars are neutral. Hubble-palette and HOO pictures no longer carry pink or orange stars; each star is balanced against its own surroundings, and the nebula round it is not touched.
- Your whole frame is kept. Deep-sky pictures used to be cropped to the subject without asking, so a 6000 x 4000 DSLR frame of a small target came back as a 700 x 1000 picture. Framing on the subject is now a button on the Framing card.
- Previews are sharp at every size: the picture is resampled for your screen by the engine, not shrunk by the window, which had lost a quarter of the fine detail.
- Camera raw files from Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and Pentax open at the sensor's own size. Fujifilm X-Trans files are refused with the way round it (convert to DNG) instead of opening as a grey picture at the wrong size, and a file that cannot be read says why instead of "No frames are selected".
- Compose: progress reads correctly, an LRGB set is registered on its luminance master, a luminance TIFF plus a colour TIFF is accepted as three channels, and a folder of unstacked frames is sent to Home to be stacked first. Red, green and blue land within a tenth of a pixel of each other.
- Mosaic: every join is refined against all its neighbours after the first placement. Stars where panels overlap are 3.6% wider than elsewhere instead of 7.9%.
- The palette chosen for a filter-wheel session is shown but locked once the stack is made; it only ever described that run.
- After each run the app sends a short note (what kind of picture, whether it finished, how long it took, and the engine's own report with every file name removed) so that when a run goes wrong for someone we can see why. It is on by default with its own switch under Help → Check for updates.
- The free copy gives three processing runs and three exports.
Stars that stay put, real star reduction, clean planet edges
- Stars no longer blink while you drag a slider: the quick preview and the finished render now treat every star the same way.
- Star reduction works: each star is drawn smaller in place, up to a third off its width at the same brightness at the centre, and a crowded field stays a field of stars, with no ghosts between them and no ring round the bright ones.
- Faint stars keep their colour. The green cap now acts only on a star's own light, so it no longer punches dark holes into the sky round stars or tints the faint ones.
- Planets are exposed by their bright zone, one rule for every planet: Saturn's globe is back where it belongs without dimming Mars.
- 16-bit SER videos whose header says the wrong byte order now open as pictures instead of noise.
- Annotation: thinner rings, and Messier, NGC, IC and other catalogues as separate switches. Large objects such as the Veil are labelled even when their centre lies outside your frame.
- A tall picture gets more of the window instead of a narrow strip, and Compose accepts TIFF and PNG channel files.
- Exports carry no mark at all, free or licensed.
- A planet or the Moon is saved at your camera's own size, as RegiStax and AutoStakkert do, instead of the larger working size that looked soft at 100%.
- The edge of a planet is clean when you zoom in: no double line round Jupiter, no grey loop in the gaps between Saturn's rings and globe, no pale rim round Mars.
- Planets are sharper and brighter by default, with less noise on fine detail.
- Colour cameras with enough frames are stacked color by color from their own pixels, which resolves more detail in each channel.
- The Moon's brightest highlands no longer turn cyan when the camera saturated red, and short Moon videos no longer show a crosshatch.
- A mono capture stays grey instead of picking up a tint.
- Deep-sky exports lose the dark border stacking can leave round the edge. TIFF exports carry their color profile.
- The Deep Sky screen says which folder to choose: your lights, darks, bias and flats, or just the lights.
Filter-wheel color, a clearer workspace
- A filter-wheel folder that holds both narrowband and red, green and blue frames asks which picture you want before it stacks: natural color with the Hα deepening the nebula, the Hubble palette, or HOO.
- The Hubble palette comes out gold and teal instead of green, and HOO keeps its red hydrogen instead of turning brown.
- Blue and OIII frames are no longer thrown out for holding fewer stars than red ones, and a filter shot on another night is stacked and aligned instead of being lost. Natural-color stars keep one color however faint they are.
- A nebula that fills the frame, like the North America Nebula, comes out brighter and no longer gray on its brightest ridge.
- Save the stacked image writes the real stack, as a 32-bit float TIFF. Opened again, it is processed as a stack instead of as a finished picture.
- The workspace shows where you are (stacked, adjust, annotate, export) with one button onward. The session's detailed notes are folded away until you want them.
- Every exported picture carries a small "Processed with Akastroid" along the bottom edge.
- The starless export is switched off while it is reworked; it was not yet good enough on dense fields and galaxies.
A guided workspace, and a mark on every export
- A step bar over the picture (Stack, Adjust, Annotate, Export) with a guide card that says where you are and what comes next.
- The analysis notes are folded into a closed Session details panel, so the workspace shows the picture rather than the paperwork.
- A “Not final” badge stays on the image until you export it.
- Every export carries “Processed with Akastroid” along the bottom, free or licensed. The unprocessed stacked export is never marked, because it is data for other software.
- The strip of empty sky that could appear along a stack border is gone again.
Ten languages
- The whole interface in English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, Português (Brasil), 日本語, 简体中文, Русский and 한국어, following your system language and switchable from the top bar.
- Photometric color calibration against the built-in catalog is on by default.
- Apple silicon and Intel Macs and Windows are all served by the updater.
Ten languages, and planets that stack clean
- Akastroid speaks ten languages: English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, Português (Brasil), 日本語, 简体中文, Русский and 한국어. It follows your Mac's language; the switch is in the top bar next to Help.
- A planet that drifts across the frame stacks clean. Frames recorded far from the reference could land a dozen pixels off and leave a faint second copy of Saturn's rings; each frame is now found from where the planet is. Captures from older webcams that carry the same fine grid pattern in every frame align on the planet rather than on the pattern.
- A planetary export opens at the size you saw it in the app. It used to open two to four times larger in Preview and look zoomed and soft.
- A finished picture dropped in on its own is shown and saved exactly as it arrived, with no extra sharpening and no resizing.
- Stack all lights is one click: it keeps every frame the grader set aside and starts the stack. It used to change the selection only, and the frame table kept showing the old one.
- On a planetary capture, drag the cut-off on the Frame quality graph to choose exactly how many frames go into the stack.
1.0, and the free tier counts exports instead of sessions
- Open, grade and process as many sessions as you like on a free copy. The counter moves only when you save a result to disk, and only once per session: a JPEG and then a TIFF of the same image costs one, not two. Three exports, for good, on this machine; a licence removes the limit. Previously opening a folder spent one, so a cloudy night and a retry used two of three before you had seen a result.
- The adjustment sliders respond on large images. A 60-megapixel composite used to re-run the whole finishing chain at full resolution for every nudge; interactive renders now work on a binned copy kept at or above preview size, and the export still renders from the full master.
- After you save an image, the export panel asks how it came out. One click on a star opens the feedback form on the website with that star, your build and your platform already filled in.
- The version number. 0.12 was the twelfth pre-release of this; nothing about the licence changes, and every 0.x key is a 1.x key.
Free now has every feature
- Batch processing, drizzle, mosaic stitching, photometric color calibration, gift artwork mode, and 16-bit TIFF and FITS export all work without a licence now. Nothing in the app is locked behind Pro any more.
- What a free copy is short of is sessions, not features: three of them, for good, on this machine. Compose, mosaic, planetary and deep-sky are counted the same way, whether you take one all the way to a finished image or just open it to see Image Doctor's frame grading. A licence removes that limit; everything else about the app is unchanged.
- Frame count is no longer limited either way. The old 25-frames-a-session cap on free copies is gone. A free copy stacks every frame you give it, the same as a licensed one.
Opens PixInsight files
- Reads XISF, the format PixInsight writes. A WBPP run leaves you with a folder of .xisf and nothing else, and that folder could not be opened before. Now you can drop it straight in. Compressed files open too, in all four codecs PixInsight uses, and mosaiced one-shot-color frames are demosaiced on the way in.
- Everything the file records comes with it: exposure, gain, filter, camera, telescope, focal length, pixel size, binning, target name and pointing coordinates, so plate solving, annotation, calibration-frame detection and channel composition all work on XISF exactly as they do on FITS.
- A mono filter set exported from PixInsight can go straight into Compose. Assign the R, G, B and luminance masters and Akastroid combines them; the filter is read from each file, so they land on the right channels by themselves.
- Importing a folder still reads only the headers, so a session of large masters lists in a moment rather than after every file has been decoded.
First public release
- Deep-sky processing: calibration from darks, flats and bias found beside your lights, frame grading, star-pattern registration that survives field rotation, and integration with sigma, Winsorized or linear-fit clipping chosen from your data.
- Planetary and lunar processing: frame grading, multi-point alignment across the disc, atmospheric dispersion correction and scale-aware wavelet sharpening.
- Image Doctor. Twelve measurements on every frame (star size, star shape, star count, drift, sky brightness and gradient, noise, signal to noise, cloud, satellite trails, focus and clipping), each scored against the rest of your session rather than a fixed number, with a named fault beside every rejection. Elongated stars in every frame are reported as the optics rather than the tracking, and no frame is rejected for a fault they all share.
- 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 color calibration against a catalog of 1.48 million stars with measured colors, applied by default when your frames record where the telescope was pointing.
- An editable histogram. Drag the three handles 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.
- Every automatic decision is listed with the measurement behind it, and any of them can be overruled.
- Mosaic stitching, narrowband channel composition, and batch processing of a folder of sessions.
- Reads FITS, camera RAW from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic and Pentax, SER and AVI video, and TIFF including 32-bit float. Exports 16-bit TIFF, PNG, JPEG and FITS, with the unprocessed stack available separately.
- Processes entirely on your own computer. Your images are never uploaded, and it works with the wifi off.
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