System requirements
What BiggSky needs to run on each platform, and which MATLAB Runtime each build uses.
If your machine is from the last few years, it will run
BiggSky is a desktop application. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is processed in the cloud — the work happens on your hardware, and more of it helps.
You do not need a MATLAB licence. BiggSky is built on MATLAB, and the MATLAB Runtime it needs is free. On Windows and macOS it installs alongside the application; on Linux you install it yourself first.
Every platform
- 8 GB RAM minimum
- 16 GB or more strongly recommended for large SER files
- Several GB of disk for the MATLAB Runtime
- Room for your captures — they are far larger than anything BiggSky writes
- An internet connection to activate; none needed afterwards
Operating systems and runtimes
Each build ships against a particular MATLAB Runtime release. The authoritative operating-system list for each is the MathWorks document linked in the last column.
| Build | Operating system | MATLAB Runtime | MathWorks requirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit | R2023b | R2023b Windows (PDF) |
| Windows — Blackwell GPU | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with an NVIDIA RTX 50-series card | R2025b | R2025b Windows (PDF) |
| Mac — Apple Silicon | macOS on M-series. A native arm64 build, not Rosetta. | R2025a | R2025a macOS (PDF) |
| Mac — Intel | macOS on Intel, 64-bit | R2023b | R2023b macOS (PDF) |
| Linux | 64-bit Intel or AMD | R2024b | R2024b Linux (PDF) |
GPU support
Optional everywhere. BiggSky runs perfectly well on the CPU — a GPU makes it faster, it does not unlock features.
| Build | GPU acceleration |
|---|---|
| Windows — standard | NVIDIA cards of Compute Capability 3.5 or higher — Kepler (2013) onwards, which is most cards still in use. It does not support Blackwell. An RTX 50-series card will simply not be used by this build. Check your card’s compute capability. |
| Windows — Blackwell | For RTX 50-series cards. This is the only build that supports them, which is the whole reason it exists. |
| Linux | Not tested. It may work; we have not verified it, so we are not claiming it. If you try it, we would genuinely like to hear how you get on. |
| macOS | No GPU acceleration on Intel or Apple Silicon. Processing runs on the CPU, which on an M-series machine is quick. |
File formats it reads
8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit variants across the still formats.
Stills
TIFF · PNG · BMP · GIF · JPEG · Camera RAW · FITS · XISF · DICOM
Video and sequences
SER · AVI · other common movie formats · numbered image sequences
A note on disk and memory
Your captures are the large thing here. A SER or AVI of a lunar or planetary session runs to gigabytes across hundreds or thousands of frames.
BiggSky does not add to that. It writes no scratch files and no calibration cache — processing happens in memory, and what lands on disk at the end is a single image file, small next to the capture it came from. The one thing that can be large is optional and deliberate: you may ask it to save the aligned, warp-corrected frames as a new SER for review.
Bit depth is yours to choose in Save Options: 8, 16 or 32-bit. Internally the data is always held as 32-bit floating point and kept linear, which is what lets the deconvolution work properly — but you decide what gets saved.
Because there is no scratch space, memory matters more than disk. Processing is quickest when the file is under about half your available RAM.
Think it will run?
The surest test is the free one. Version …, fully featured for 30 days.