AkastroidEverything it does,
and why.
Akastroid makes hundreds of decisions automatically. Here is what they are.
Getting your data in
Whatever your camera writes, Akastroid opens — no converting, no exporting first.
FITS
The astronomy standard. Seestar, ZWO, ASIAIR, N.I.N.A., anything.
Camera RAW
Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF, Adobe DNG and more.
Planetary video
SER in every common colour format, and AVI both uncompressed and MJPEG.
Calibration
Darks, flats and bias found from your folder layout and applied without being asked.
Deciding what is worth keeping
Every frame is measured before anything is stacked, and every rejection comes with a reason.
Star quality
Count, sharpness, roundness and how far each frame's stars have drifted from the session's own norm.
Sky quality
Background level, gradient strength, noise and signal-to-noise.
Artefacts
Cloud, satellite and aircraft trails, lost focus, overexposure — each named.
Your call
Overrule any automatic decision with a click. Nothing is hidden.
Building the image
The expensive, once-per-session work: alignment and integration.
Star alignment
Asterism matching, so frames that rotated between exposures still line up. An alt-az mount is no problem.
Integration
Averaging, median, sigma clipping or winsorized clipping — chosen from how deep your stack is, not from a preference.
Drizzle
Reconstruct at higher resolution when your frames were dithered. Akastroid measures whether they were and says so.
Mosaics
Panels matched into an overlap graph, level-matched at the seams and feathered together.
Making it look right
Adapted to what is actually in your frame, not to a preset.
Gradient removal
Light pollution, moon glow and vignetting modelled and removed while the sky keeps its level. A background subtracted to black looks wrong.
Photometric colour
Your field matched against 533,000 catalogued stars with measured colours, and the white balance fitted to what those stars actually are.
Adaptive stretch
The curve is solved from your histogram, not guessed, with bright cores protected so a nebula core stays a core.
Denoise and detail
Multiscale, applied hardest where the signal is weakest and held back over real structure.
Planets and the Moon
Lucky imaging, in one application rather than four.
Frame grading
Every frame in the capture scored for sharpness, with a graph of how the seeing changed.
Multi-point alignment
The disc tracked in pieces, so the atmosphere's local warping comes out. This is what separates a soft stack from a sharp one.
Finer-grid integration
An undersampled planet is integrated onto a finer grid, recovering detail below the original pixel scale.
Dispersion and wavelets
Red and blue realigned to green, then six sharpening layers you control directly.
Finishing and sharing
Three styles
Natural, Enhanced and Dramatic, all rendered from the same data. Switching is instant.
Colour tools
Histogram, curves, hue-selective saturation, green-cast removal, temperature and tint — with a live preview.
Export
JPEG and PNG for sharing, 16-bit TIFF for printing, and a FITS master that keeps the float data and a record of what was done to it.
Gift artwork
A print-ready poster built around your real telescope image, with the photograph and the decoration clearly labelled as different things.
What Akastroid will not do
It runs no generative model. Nothing paints in nebula structure, invents detail or sharpens by hallucination. Machine learning is used to measure and tochoose — frame quality, noise, artefacts, parameters — never to add something the telescope did not record. Every pixel in your finished image traces back to a photon, and the processing log tells you what happened to it.