Learn BiggSky

BiggSky is an application for processing astronomy images. It is designed to be easy to use, intuitive and powerful. It is probably best known for its deconvolution technology, which removes blur from images.

BiggSky takes your raw astro images and calibrates, stacks, enhances and colorizes them in a single application. The results can also be exported and used in whatever else you already work with.

Long-exposure imaging of galaxies and nebulae, and planetary, lunar and solar images.

8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit variants of TIFF, PNG, BMP, GIF, JPEG, Camera RAW, FITS, DICOM and XISF, plus SER and various movie formats.

Deconvolution is a mathematical process for removing blur from an image. To reverse the blur you need to know its shape — the Point Spread Function, or PSF. BiggSky uses blind deconvolution, which means it works the PSF out from your image rather than requiring you to supply it from a reference star.

No. No A.I. algorithms are currently used. Detail in the output comes from the data in your input — nothing is generated to fill in what was not recorded.

No. The MATLAB Runtime is included with the installation, and no MATLAB license of your own is needed.

Yes, with recent NVIDIA graphics cards on Windows. There is a separate Windows build for NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 50-series) hardware — see the download page. GPU acceleration is not available on macOS.

Because they are not all the same. A modern processor mixes a few fast performance cores with a larger number of small efficient ones — the Beelink GTI14 we test on reports 22 processors, but only six of them are performance cores. A run finishes when its slowest worker finishes, so handing work to the little cores holds the fast ones up: past a point, more workers makes processing slower rather than faster. BiggSky sizes its pool to the cores that will actually carry the work.

You can override that. The Settings tab has a PoolWorkers entry — 0 lets BiggSky choose, any higher number fixes the worker count, and 1 means a single thread with no pool. Time a stack both ways on your own machine before settling on a number.

One exception worth knowing: a tiled deconvolution uses the CPU and the GPU at the same time when both Use GPU and Use CPU Multi-Core are ticked, running tiles on the graphics card and on the CPU workers at once.

What that looks like measured. BiggSky 0.5.40, a 5444 × 3636 RGB lunar image tiled at 1000 px with 100 px overlap — 24 tiles — on a Beelink GTI14 (Core Ultra 9 185H, six performance cores) with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti:

Going from one worker to two nearly halves the time. Doubling again, to four, gains only a fifth more; six gains a further eighth. The returns fall away long before the core count runs out — that is the flattening to watch for on your own machine.

None of this needs a graphics card. The same image on an Apple M1 Mac, which has no GPU acceleration at all and chose eight workers on its own, took 259 s.

Possibly — the deconvolution is not specific to astronomy. Get in touch and describe what you are trying to do.

30 days, and during those days it limits nothing. The trial is the complete application — no watermark, no disabled features, and no payment details required to begin. The count starts when you install BiggSky and validate your key, not when you request it.

Afterward BiggSky switches to Free mode: you can still open, view and export everything you have already processed, but the premium operations need a license. Support & licensing has the detail.

There are four editions and you can buy a perpetual license or subscribe annually. Current prices are on the pricing page, along with the license terms — personal use, active on up to 5 of your own computers at a time.

Payment is handled by Stripe, so your card details are entered on Stripe's checkout and never touch this site.

Yes. Clubs, schools and registered non-profits are eligible for discounted licensing — get in touch with your organization's details for a quote. Commercial, government and institutional use is licensed separately.