About BiggSky

BiggSky exists because the hardest part of astrophotography happens after the capture. Atmosphere and optics blur every frame, and undoing that blur properly is a mathematical problem, not a slider.

The application takes raw frames — long-exposure deep sky stacks, or SER and AVI captures of the Moon, Sun and planets — and carries them through calibration, stacking, deconvolution, color and export without leaving the program. The deconvolution is blind: it measures the shape of the blur from your own data rather than asking you to find a reference star or guess at a radius.

Nothing is generated. No machine-learning upscaling, no invented detail. What comes out was recorded by your sensor; BiggSky just gets more of it into view.

I'm David Biggs, and I have been working on the same problem since the 1990s: how to automatically recover detail from a blurred and noisy image, when there is no knowledge of how it was degraded. It began as a PhD thesis on accelerated iterative blind deconvolution at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Back then processing Hubble Space Telescope imagery, before the corrective optics, was where I got started. The acceleration from that work is still what runs inside MATLAB's deconvlucy and deconvblind. I then spent many years working on the issues with imaging live cells at high magnification and in three dimensions. I also spent a decade on processing retinal images for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease.

The Moon or a planet seen through a turbulent atmosphere is the same mathematical problem as a cell seen through a coverslip — so BiggSky is that work pointed at the night sky, written in the first place because I wanted it for my own captures.

BiggSky is designed from the ground up to process vast amounts of image data, in an automated and efficient manner, and produce the highest quality results from your telescope.

KB Imaging Solutions LLC has been independent since 2006, working on signal and imaging applications in the life sciences. BiggSky is in public beta: development is active, releases are frequent, and feedback from imagers using it shapes what gets built next.

Published work and citations: Google Scholar.