BiggSky — astrophotography image processing software
What BiggSky is, and who it's for
BiggSky is a desktop application for processing astrophotography. It takes what your camera recorded — video captures of the Moon, Sun and planets, or long-exposure frames of nebulae and galaxies — and carries them through calibration, stacking, sharpening, color and export without leaving the program.
What sets it apart is the sharpening. Atmosphere and optics blur every frame; BiggSky measures the shape of that blur from your own data and reverses it mathematically. No reference star to pick, no wavelet sliders to guess at, and nothing invented — the detail it recovers was already in your frames.
Who it's for
- Lunar, solar and planetary imagers working from SER or AVI captures
- Deep sky imagers with long-exposure stacks
- Anyone already using AutoStakkert! or PixInsight who wants a better sharpening step — BiggSky reads their output and hands results back
- Beginners who would rather press one button than learn ten
Probably not for you if you are after A.I. upscaling or invented detail. BiggSky does neither, deliberately — here is why.
What would you like to do?
Three routes into BiggSky, depending on where you are.
I'm new to BiggSky
Install it, get a license and process your first image. The Quick Start takes about fifteen minutes.
Show me what it can do
Real results from real imagers — several of them AstroBin Images of the Day. See the gallery.
Give me the software
Version 0.6.1 beta for Windows, macOS and Linux. Free for 30 days.
Calibrate. Stack. Enhance. Publish.
The whole pipeline in one application — from raw frames to a finished image, without shuttling files between four different programs.
11 seconds · raw frames to finished image
Calibrate
Apply darks, flats and bias to your raw frames. Camera RAW, FITS, XISF, SER and TIFF all read natively.
Stack
Automatic frame grading and alignment. No alignment points to place, and no grid artifacts from drizzle. Already stacked in AutoStakkert! or elsewhere? Load that stack and start at Enhance.
Enhance
Blind deconvolution measures the blur in your own data and removes it. No reference star, no wavelet guesswork.
Publish
Colorize, crop and export at 8, 16 or 32 bits — or hand the result to your usual finishing tool.
Built around the blur, not around presets
BiggSky measures the optical and atmospheric degradation in each image and reverses it mathematically. Nothing is invented and nothing is hallucinated.
Automatic PSF estimation
Blind deconvolution derives the Point Spread Function from the image itself. You do not need a reference star, and you do not need to guess a radius.
Tiled processing
Seeing varies across a large lunar or solar frame. BiggSky splits the field into tiles and solves each one separately, then blends them seamlessly.
Clean stacks, fewer artifacts
High-frequency ringing and drizzle grid patterns are suppressed at the stacking stage — which is exactly what lets the deconvolution go further.
Batch it overnight
Queue a night's worth of SER or AVI captures and let BiggSky stack, crop and deconvolve them unattended. Review the results in the morning.
The same frame, before and after
Drag the handle. Everything on the right was already in your data — deconvolution recovers it, it does not invent it.
Processed with BiggSky
Work from the BiggSky community, including several AstroBin Images of the Day.
See it work on real data
A full walkthrough of lunar, solar and planetary enhancement, recorded live for The Astro Imaging Channel.
Runs about an hour. If you want the short version, the Quick Start guide covers the same ground in writing.
Windows, macOS and Linux
One application, built for each platform. Apple Silicon is a native build, not translated through Rosetta.
Windows
Windows 10 and 11.
64-bitMac — Apple Silicon
A native M-series build, not Rosetta.
arm64Mac — Intel
For Intel-based Macs.
x86-64Linux
64-bit Intel and AMD.
x86-64NVIDIA GPU acceleration on Windows
An NVIDIA card cuts processing time substantially — anything from Kepler (2013) onward, which is most cards still in use.
There is a separate Windows build for Blackwell, the RTX 50-series, so the newest hardware is properly supported rather than merely tolerated.
Where GPU support stands
- Windows — NVIDIA, Compute Capability 3.5 and up. RTX 50-series needs the separate Blackwell build.
- Linux — not tested. It may work; we have not verified it, so we do not claim it.
- macOS — no GPU acceleration. Processing runs on the CPU.
- SSE Lite — no GPU acceleration. Same results, more slowly.
Developed on a 2008 workstation with a GTX 780 Ti, and tested and benchmarked on a Beelink GTI14 with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti. Yours is almost certainly somewhere between.
SER Tool: a free lossless compressor
Planetary, lunar and solar sessions fill a drive faster than anything else. sertool compresses SER captures losslessly, checks every file against its original before anything is deleted, and works through a whole folder unattended — from the standalone SER Tools app, or from the command line.
- Lossless — every pixel comes back exactly as captured.
- Verified — the original stays put until the compressed copy checks out.
- No lock-in — the format is Motion JPEG 2000 plus one small box, and it is fully documented.
Try it on your own data
Version 0.6.1 beta, released November 1, 2026. Fully featured for 30 days — no watermark, no locked features, no card needed.