Download Autostakkert 2 and 3 – Free planetary stacking software

Astrophotography Telescope

6 years ago

AutoStakkert! – or AS! – is a free software for planetary stacking developed by Emil Kraaikamp. It produce excellent and amazing stacking results with as little effort as possible. It’s certainly the most simple software to use.

AS!2 or AS!3 uses its own recentrer algorithm to recenter frames. So you don’t need to use extra program to do that (like PIPP for example).

Autostakkert on the other hand is very easy to use, works very fast, and produces very good results out of the box.

AutoStakkert! is not meant to post-process your images, although it does support a 5×5 convolution filter which is compatible with Photoshops Custom filter, and which gives you the option to preview the stacks. You can open up the raw stacks in any of your favourite image processing programs ( Photoshop, GIMP, Iris, Registax etc.). Usually I end up opening the RAW stacks in Photoshop CS4 and take it from there.

Features of Autostakkert :

Support for TIFF, FIT, BMP, AVI (uncompressed) and SER files (thanks to Heiko Wilkens). MOV files and other compressed files are also supported when FFmpeg executable is available to AS!. In principle there are no file size limitations.
Monochrome and color recordings (both raw bayer, and RGB).
Very fast processing due to multicore support and advanced image buffering techniques.
Multiple Alignment Points (MAP) results in accurate alignment especially for wider field images (Sun/Moon), but even planetary targets such as Jupiter benefit significantly from MAP.
Frame viewer to quickly scan through all the frames (sorted by quality)
Sophisticated MAP analysis and recombination to ensure sharp stacking results. Yes, I like to throw in some fancy words, but it actually works…
Automated frame rejection techniques to remove poor quality and incomplete frames.
Batch processing.
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