Features
One application for the whole pipeline — calibration, stacking, deconvolution, color and export — across lunar, solar, planetary and deep sky imaging.
Blind deconvolution
Deconvolution is the mathematical removal of blur. To do it you need to know the shape of the blur — the Point Spread Function.
Most tools ask you to supply that shape: pick a star, set a radius, choose a wavelet layer, then judge the result by eye. BiggSky works it out from the image itself. That is what blind means here — the PSF is estimated from your own data, iteratively, alongside the corrected image.
The practical consequence is that it works where there is no usable reference star at all: the lunar surface, a solar disk, a planetary disk.
What that gives you
- Automatic PSF estimation — no reference star needed
- Multi-iteration solving, with control over how far it goes
- Recovers real peaks and edges without blowing out highlights
- Works on stacked results or on single frames
- Can stack and deconvolve in a single pass
Or skip all of it and press one button
Every stage below is available on its own when you want control. Do It All runs the whole sequence on your files, unattended, and writes the results to a BiggSky sub-directory.
- Calibrate
- Analyze
- Stack Frames
- Remove Stars
- Deconvolve
- Color
Stacking video and image sequences
BiggSky reads SER and AVI video and image sequences, grades the frames, aligns them and stacks — without you placing a single alignment point.
Automation
- Fully automated processing of multiple files
- No need to set alignment points
- Automatic frame percentage determination
- Can stack and deconvolve in a single process
- Queue a night's captures and leave it running
Cleaner output
- Suppresses high-frequency artifacts common to other stackers
- Suppresses the grid artifacts left by drizzle processing
- Better deconvolution results, because there are fewer stacking artifacts to amplify
- Can generate multiple super-resolution results in a single pass
Big files
- Handles very large files, limited only by your machine's memory
- Fastest when the SER or AVI is under half your available memory
- Can save the aligned and warp-corrected frames as a new SER for review
Tiled processing
Atmospheric seeing is not uniform across a wide lunar or solar frame, and it changes between frames. BiggSky divides the field into local tiles, solves the distortion in each independently, and blends the tiles back together — so one soft corner does not drag down the whole image.
See what the atmosphere is doing
The lower panel is the distortion BiggSky measured while registering a real lunar capture. Hue is the direction the air pushed that patch of the Moon; full color is about two pixels of movement. The wheel in the corner is the key.
That field is solved for every frame and taken out before the frames are combined, which is why fine detail survives the stack instead of being averaged into a blur. You can make the same movie from your own captures — it is the Dewarp Movie menu.
The capture ran at 11.5 frames a second and this plays at 10, so the churn you are watching is near enough the speed it really happened. Each frame is a one-millisecond exposure, short enough to freeze the air rather than average it.
200 frames of the Moon, 5 October 2025. ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, 0.98 ms exposures, 11.5 fps.
20 seconds · near real time
Deep sky processing
Galaxies and nebulae take the same route: calibrate, register, stack, enhance, colorize, export.
Calibration
Darks, flats and bias frames applied to your light frames before anything else happens.
Registration and stacking
Frames are aligned and combined, with poor frames graded out automatically.
Color
Colorize the stacked result, or export the linear data and finish it in the tool you already use.
Reads what your camera writes
8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit variants are supported across the still formats.
Still images
TIFF · PNG · BMP · GIF · JPEG · Camera RAW · FITS · XISF · DICOM
Video and sequences
SER · AVI · and other common movie formats · numbered image sequences
Runs on your machine
Processing happens on your machine, not in the cloud. Your data stays on your disk, and BiggSky never uploads it on its own — see the privacy policy for the opt-in ways you can send us a file when asking for help.
GPU acceleration
Recent NVIDIA cards on Windows accelerate processing substantially. A separate build supports Blackwell (RTX 50-series) hardware. GPU acceleration is not available on macOS.
No MATLAB license needed
BiggSky is built on MATLAB, but the required MATLAB Runtime ships with the installer. You do not need a MATLAB license of your own.
BiggSkyCLI: process with no window
The same stacking and deconvolution engine as the app, run from a command prompt, a script or another program.
- Stack and deconvolve a night of lunar, solar or planetary captures unattended
- Deconvolve a folder of AutoStakkert or WinJUPOS stacks in one command
- Job files and settings profiles, so a session re-runs with the same settings next month
- Render, sharpen, mosaic, derotate and Dewarp Movie as commands
- JSON output and exit codes for capture programs, scripts and AI agents
SSE Pro DSO Universe Included in all three, and in the free trial.
# stack and deconvolve a night's captures BiggSkyCLI process D:\Night -t planetary # deconvolve an AutoStakkert stack BiggSkyCLI process jupiter_AS4.tif -t planetary # check a saved job, then run it BiggSkyCLI run night.json --dry-run BiggSkyCLI run night.json # join lunar tiles into one image BiggSkyCLI mosaic D:\Moon\panels
Results land where the app puts them, with a project you can open in BiggSky to carry on by hand.
To have an AI agent drive BiggSky, give it the manual as one Markdown file: BiggSkyCLI-Manual.md. It is also installed beside BiggSkyCLI.
More features
Everything below is implemented and shipping today, not planned.
Lunar mosaics
Join overlapping lunar panels into one image. Tiles are matched on structure rather than brightness, unmatched tiles are dropped rather than forced, and the alignment is chosen by how well it predicts the matches it was not given.
Planetary derotation
Combine captures taken minutes apart without smearing the detail you just recovered. Jupiter and Mars derotate on their own rotation clocks, and Saturn's rings at Keplerian rates. Set your WinJUPOS observer once.
Movies
Interpolate a handful of processed stacks into a smooth rotation movie — one-minute frames between keyframes twenty minutes apart, each one derotated rather than cross-faded. Or export the dewarped frames themselves and watch the atmosphere move across the disc.
Wavefront analysis and collimation
Shoot a short defocus series and BiggSky fits the wavefront of your telescope: astigmatism, coma, spherical and the rest, with a collimation check you can work from at the eyepiece. Telescope profiles are saved per instrument.
SSE Lite gets the collimation check; the full analysis is in Pro, DSO and Universe.
Unsharp mask, done properly
A band-limited unsharp mask applied after deconvolution, with the sky protected so a faint background is not dragged up into noise along with the detail.
Super-resolution
Where the optics out-resolve the pixels, BiggSky can reconstruct on a finer grid than the sensor sampled — recovering real detail above the native Nyquist limit, not invented detail.
Clip time limiting
Restrict processing to the best window within a long capture, rather than spending frames on the part of the night the seeing ruined.
Multi-timepoint processing
Take one long planetary video and process it automatically as a series of short clips, which can then be derotated and averaged together — more signal, less noise, without smearing the rotation.
Automatic flats and darks
Extract calibration frames straight from a video and apply them, for when the dust specks only become obvious long after the night they were shot.
Ten languages
Menus, buttons and tooltips in English, Français, Español, Deutsch, Italiano, Português (Brasil), 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文 and 한국어. BiggSky offers your system's language on first run; change it any time on the Settings tab.
What each edition includes
SSE Lite is a simpler, low-cost version for the casual imager. Deconvolution, mosaics, derotation, Dewarp Movie and the unsharp mask are all there in full. Here is how the four compare.
The only real test is your own data
Version 0.6.1 beta. Fully featured for 30 days — no watermark, no locked features.