AkastroidSmart telescopes
Get more from your Seestar, DWARF or Vespera
Your telescope stacks as it goes. Give Akastroid the single frames it saved and it grades every one, drops the bad ones, aligns the rest through the field rotation and finishes the picture. You choose nothing.
Mac, Windows and Linux. Free to try, and your images stay on your computer.
Three steps
- Before the session, set your telescope's app to keep every single frame (on a Seestar the setting is Save every frame). Without it there are no frames to restack.
- Copy the frames to your computer by USB. On a Seestar they are in the folder ending in
_sub. - Open that folder in Akastroid. It reads the model from the files, grades and stacks them, removes the gradient, balances the colour and sharpens the result.
Why restacking is worth it
The telescope adds each frame to the stack the moment it is taken, so a passing cloud, a gust of wind or a satellite at minute forty is in the picture for good. On a computer every frame is measured first: star shape, sky brightness, cloud and trails. The poor ones are left out, and the rest are combined with a rejection method chosen from how much the sky changed during the session. The usual result is fainter outer nebulosity, cleaner stars and less noise from the same night.
Your telescope, recognised by name
Smart telescopes write their model into each file but often leave out the focal length and the pixel size. Akastroid knows thirteen of them, from the Seestar S30 and S50 to the DWARF 3, Vespera II, Celestron Origin and eVscope 2, and fills in the two numbers. That is what lets it plate-solve the field, label the objects in it and match star colours to a catalogue. A model it does not know is named in the log but never given guessed numbers.
Field rotation, handled
An alt-azimuth mount turns the field slowly through the night, so frames an hour apart can be rotated by tens of degrees. Frames are aligned for rotation as well as position, and the edge that only a few frames covered is trimmed so it does not show as a noisy border.
Every decision written down
Which frames were dropped and why, which rejection method was used, how far the picture was stretched: it is all in the processing log beside the result. You can ignore it, or read it and learn what the stacking did with your night.
Guides: Seestar FITS files and processing smart telescope images.
Which smart telescopes does it recognise?
Seestar S30, S50 and the Pro models, DWARF 3, DWARF II and mini, Vaonis Vespera and Vespera II, Celestron Origin, and Unistellar eVscope and eVscope 2. The model is read from the file header, and its focal length and pixel size are filled in, which plate solving and annotation need.
Which folder do I open?
The folder that holds the individual frames. On a Seestar that is the one ending in _sub, full of Light_*.fit files. Keep the device's Stacked_*.fit out of it: it is already an average of many frames, and stacking it again alongside single frames weights it wrongly.
I only kept the stacked file. Is that any use?
Yes. Open the Stacked_*.fit on its own and Akastroid finishes it: the gradient removed, the colour balanced and the result stretched. To restack from the start you need the single frames, which a Seestar only keeps if Save every frame was on before the session.
Why restack at all, when the telescope already stacked it?
The telescope stacks as it goes and cannot go back. Restacking on a computer grades every frame first, throws out the ones spoiled by cloud, wind or a satellite, and only then combines the rest. The faint outer parts of a nebula usually come up further, with less noise.
My frames rotate during the session. Is that a problem?
No. Smart telescopes on an alt-azimuth mount rotate the field as the night goes on. Frames are aligned for rotation as well as position, and the edge that only a few frames covered is trimmed rather than left noisy.
Is it free to try?
Yes, with every feature. A free copy has ten processing runs and three exports, on your own data, with no account.