Questions,
answered plainly.

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 — 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 one network request — an update check, which you can switch off under Help — and it sends only the version you are running and your platform. With that off it makes none at all. It works with the wifi off, and it will keep working if this website disappears.

No, and that distinction matters. Akastroid uses learned and statistical methods to measure your data and choose parameters — which frames are sharp, how noisy the stack is, how far to stretch. It runs no generative model. Nothing invents structure that was not photographed.

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, does them, and tells you what it did. 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.

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. That normally takes four separate programs.

A hundred-frame DSLR session is two to three minutes on an M-series Mac. A planetary video of eight hundred frames is a few seconds.

Stacking caches every registered frame on disk — roughly width × height × channels × 4 bytes each, so a 134-frame DSLR session is about 13 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.

No. One payment, yours permanently. It covers one computer at a time on any platform — the same key activates the macOS, Windows or Linux build, and you download whichever you need. Changing machines is a transfer, not a second purchase: deactivate on the old one and activate on the new one, as often as you like. Every 1.x update is included for as long as you use it; a future 2.0 is a separate purchase.

The free version processes up to 25 frames a session with every feature enabled, so you can find out before paying. If you buy and it still isn't right, email within 7 days and you get your money back — 14 days in the UK and the EU, where the law gives you longer.

They are your photographs. Akastroid claims nothing.