AstroSharper
Your lucky imaging companion
Only for Mac
Free
Mac
Native macOS lucky imaging for Sun, Moon and planets. Drop a SER capture, press Run, and AutoNuke aligns, stacks and deconvolves it — no parameters to guess but still fun
AstroSharper turns long planetary, solar and lunar capture sessions into crisp final images — natively on your Mac. Built from the ground up in Swift and Metal for Apple Silicon, it runs every step on the GPU: quality grading, alignment, lucky stacking, wavelet sharpening and deconvolution. No Python wrappers, no Wine, no Boot Camp.
ONE-CLICK STACKING
Drop a folder of SER captures, switch on the AutoNuke master toggle and press Run Lucky Stack. The engine decides everything per capture — alignment-point geometry, PSF sigma, keep-percentage and whether to use multi-point local refinement — so there is nothing to guess at. Walk away and come back to a stacked, aligned, deconvolved master file.
Already have stacked TIFF, PNG or JPEG images? Skip stacking entirely and use the post-processing sharpening and tone pipeline on its own — same UI, same Apple-Silicon-native speed.
ALIGNMENT & STACKING
- Two stacking modes: Lightspeed (single best-frame reference, global alignment) and Scientific (top-percent reference build with multi-point local refinement).
- Disc-centroid and reference-ROI stabilization that lock onto the solar or lunar limb, a sunspot or a crater — robust against thin cloud and seeing wobble.
- Per-channel stacking for one-shot-colour cameras, catching per-frame atmospheric chromatic dispersion the standard path cannot see.
- Drizzle 1.5x / 2x / 3x reconstruction with anti-aliasing pre-filter.
- Opt-in drift correction for an object that slowly wandered across a long capture.
SHARPENING & DECONVOLUTION
- Auto-PSF measures the point-spread function straight from the planetary limb — no manual sigma, no tile grid.
- Wiener and Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, a-trous wavelet sharpening and unsharp masking, all GPU-accelerated.
- A 4K solar frame goes through unsharp mask in under 10 ms on an Apple M2.
- Tone curve, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation editing in perceptual colour space.
QUALITY INTELLIGENCE
- Per-frame sharpness HUD with a live variance-of-Laplacian readout, dimensions, bit depth and capture timestamp.
- One-click video-quality analysis that samples your capture and recommends a keep-percentage.
- On-disk quality cache, so re-opening a capture you already scanned is instant.
- Sortable sharpness column to find the sharpest frame in a folder of intermediates.
FOLDER WATCH & AUTO-STACK
Point AstroSharper at your capture folder and walk away. Each new SER is stacked the moment its capture finishes writing — leave it running overnight and wake up to a folder of finished masters. Size-stability gating means a half-written file is never read too early, and the existing backlog is left untouched.
FORMATS
- Input: SER, AVFoundation-supported video, and TIFF / PNG / JPEG for post-processing.
- Output: 16-bit TIFF, PNG, JPEG, plus animated and video exports.
- Quick Look thumbnails and previews for SER files, right in the Finder.
BUILT FOR APPLE SILICON
AstroSharper is a true native Mac app — fast, quiet and fully sandboxed. Made for astrophotographers who always wished their Windows-only stacking workflow had a proper macOS home.
Feedback is always welcome.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Colour .ser files now open correctly
Some .ser captures — Siril-written ones in particular — appeared as a flat
grey image covered in a fine line pattern. AstroSharper was using the wrong
colour-layout codes from the SER specification and read those files as
monochrome, decoding only a third of each frame. Colour .ser captures now open
and stack correctly, and files exported from AstroSharper are readable in
other tools. Nothing about your existing files needs changing.
More of your video works
Lucky Stack now accepts .mov, .mp4 and .m4v alongside .ser and .avi, so a
video made from an image sequence can be stacked directly. 16-bit RGB .ser
files stack too — they were previously refused.
Satellite and aircraft transit detection
One click scans a capture for an ISS, satellite or aircraft crossing, decides
whether one really happened, and measures it: frame range, entry and exit
points, speed, straightness, and separation from the target in degrees on the
Sun or Moon. A badge marks the file and the export trim marks jump to the
crossing, so you can save just those frames. Works on star fields, the Sun and
the Moon, handles Barlow and partial-disc framings, and copes with two objects
in one video. Results are cached, so reopening a folder lights up known
transits instantly.
Instant scrubbing for large captures
An optional one-time proxy makes scrubbing through 8–20 GB captures immediate
instead of laggy, and covers the whole capture rather than a sparse handful of
frames.
Better results on imperfect captures
• Coverage-aware cropping keeps far more of the frame on tightly framed or
drifting captures — on a tight Jupiter capture it preserved about 44% more
of the disc.
• Frames ruined by a seeing jump, a gust or a tracking jerk are detected and
dropped before stacking, while steady drift is preserved.
• A neutral "Other" preset for star fields, comets and satellite passes.
Colour and export fixes
• One-shot-colour captures keep their white balance when exported as video.
• Exported video is tagged BT.709, so a black sky stays black instead of
turning blue.
• Scrubbing a colour capture no longer shows a corrupted mosaic while dragging.
• Zoom stays anchored under the pointer at every zoom level.
• Pausing playback shows exactly the frame the counter says.
• Opening a .ser from the Finder while the app is running no longer opens a
duplicate window.
The developer, Joerg Klaas, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Joerg Klaas
- Size
- 1.9 MB
- Category
- Photo & Video
- Compatibility
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Mac
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © joergsflow
