The Growing List of Mac Planetary Imaging and Processing Applications

AutoStakkert has no Mac version. It never has, and the developer says there are no plans for one: the official download page states the software is Windows only, runs under Wine on Linux and macOS, and that native versions are not coming. So if you searched for "AutoStakkert for Mac" and found a pile of forum threads and Wine tutorials, that is why. What exists instead is a set of Mac applications that do the same job, and as of 2026 several of them run natively on Apple Silicon.

I wrote the first version of this page in 2020. Back then the honest answer was "install Python and run Planetary System Stacker." That answer is out of date. Here is what the Mac actually has now, capture and stacking, with what each one does and where each one still falls short.

What the Windows tools map to on the Mac

Almost every planetary tutorial on YouTube assumes a Windows machine running four separate programs. That chain exists for historical reasons, not because planetary imaging requires four programs. Here is what each one corresponds to if you stay on macOS.

The interesting rows are PIPP and WinJUPOS. Preprocessing and derotation were separate programs on Windows because nobody built them into a stacker. On the Mac they are features inside applications rather than applications in their own right.

Capturing on the Mac

Capture is the half of the workflow people forget about when they ask about AutoStakkert. A stacker is only as good as the SER file you feed it, and this is where the Mac has quietly caught up.

Laminar is the Mac Observatory capture app, currently at version 1.7. It requires macOS 15 and Apple Silicon, which is a real limitation if you are on an older Intel machine. In exchange you get direct vendor SDK support for ZWO ASI, PlayerOne, QHY, ToupTek, SVBONY, Altair, OGMA, Omegon, MallinCam, and RisingCam, plus generic UVC devices including iPhone Continuity Camera. If you have an iPhone and a phone eyepiece holder, that is a quick way to dabble in planetary imaging without buying a dedicated camera.

The features I care about most came from testers rather than from a spec. Custom ROI selection, shaped in part by solar imagers running spectroheliographs, where the region you read off the sensor is the instrument. A warning when your capture length is long enough that Jupiter or Mars will visibly rotate during the run, which is the difference between a sharp stack and a smeared one. And continuous disk write speed monitoring: Laminar measures what your drive actually sustains, names the volume, and tells you whether it can keep up, so you find out before the session rather than afterward when frames are missing.

FireCapture is still the reference tool for a lot of imagers, and it does have a Mac build at version 2.7.15. Read the compatibility grid on the FireCapture site carefully though, because the Mac column is shorter than the Windows column. On macOS it covers Altair, OGMA, PlayerOne, QHY, SVBony, ToupTek and Omegon, and ZWO ASI. Basler, FLIR, TIS, LUCID, NexImage, Skyris, and anything going through ASCOM are Windows only. The Mac download is also an x64 build, so on Apple Silicon it runs through Rosetta.

AstroDMx Capture deserves more attention than it gets. It is free, actively developed by Nicola Amanda Mackin, currently at 2.17.2, and it has shipped a native Apple Silicon build since version 2.6.3. It supports a wide spread of cameras including UVC devices and capture cards, and it added INDI mount, camera, focuser, and filter wheel support in the 2.0.2 series. The catch is that it is not notarised by Apple, so macOS reports the app bundle as damaged on first launch. The developer explains this openly on the site: notarisation carries an annual fee that is difficult to justify for free software.

If you shoot ZWO exclusively, ASICap inside ASIStudio is the path of least resistance. Note that ZWO's macOS download is version 1.8 and was last updated in April 2023, so the Mac build trails the Windows one.

oaCapture is still listed everywhere, including in the 2020 version of this page, but its last release was 1.8.0 in December 2020 and the Mac build is Intel. It works if your gear is older, and the source is on GitHub, but it is no longer where I would send a new imager.

Stacking and sharpening on the Mac

This is the part people are searching for when they type "AutoStakkert Mac" into Google. The thing AutoStakkert does that simpler stackers do not is local alignment: instead of aligning whole frames, it places a mesh of alignment points across the planet and aligns each patch independently, because atmospheric seeing distorts different parts of the disc differently. Any stacker without that will give you a softer result, no matter how many frames you throw at it.

Strata is the Mac Observatory processing app, at version 1.1.2. It runs the whole pipeline in one window across seven phases: import, analyze, stack, derotate, sharpen, color, export. Frame quality scoring runs on the GPU with an interactive selection curve, stacking uses local correction with drizzle at 1.5x, 2x, and 3x, sharpening covers wavelets and Wiener deconvolution, and derotation handles multi-capture combination with a separate path for Saturn's rings. It reads SER v2 and v3 at 8 and 16 bit, the uncompressed RAW8 AVI subset that ZWO's ASIAir and ASICap produce, and TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and FITS stills. It needs macOS 14.6 or later. What it deliberately does not do is deep sky work, and it does not assemble mosaics: one capture in, one stacked result out.

The colour work is where Strata pulls away from the other Mac stackers. There is a solar palette system with ten built-in palettes drawn from what solar imagers actually use, and you can duplicate any of them and edit the stops yourself, with a background tint on top. Solar Tone sits alongside the wavelets in the sharpen phase. For lunar work there is mineral enhancement, which pulls out the colour differences between titanium-rich and iron-rich terrain that your eye cannot see in the raw stack. And every image, colour or mono, gets a Levels card with draggable black point, midtone, and white point stops on a live GPU histogram, with a clip readout that counts inside the planet disc rather than across the whole frame.

Planet Stacker X from Rain City Astro is free on the Mac App Store and is the easiest recommendation I can make to someone who wants to try this tonight without spending anything. It handles SER and RAW AVI, offers automatic or manual frame selection with a sharpness graph, previews alignment live, and includes wavelet sharpening, RGB shift correction, tone curves, noise reduction, and batch processing. The developer's own story is worth reading: he got tired of not being able to stack planetary data on an M1 MacBook Pro without virtualisation, wrote a script, and the script became the app.

Planetary System Stacker is the one I recommended in 2020, and it is still algorithmically excellent. Rolf Hempel's own documentation states that test results show at least the same image quality as AutoStakkert!3, and it builds a proper alignment point mesh with per-point frame ranking. The problem is entirely about getting it running. The current PyPI release is 0.9.8.3 from July 2023, and the only macOS wheel published is an Intel one, so on Apple Silicon you are running it under an x86 Python through Rosetta. Nick Kohrn's launcher, which I linked in the original version of this article, still helps, but it is a project from a different era of Mac hardware.

LuckyStackWorker changed a lot since I first covered it. Wilco Kasteleijn added derotation and stacking in version 7.0.0, and version 7.1.0 improved derotation reliability and added direct derotation of mono R, G, and B sets. It is not a lucky imaging stacker in the AutoStakkert sense, since it works on image stacks rather than raw video, but the deconvolution, dispersion correction, and batch sharpening are strong and it is free under the MIT licence. There are Mac builds for both Intel and Apple Silicon. Like AstroDMx, it is unsigned, and on Apple Silicon you have to run a quarantine removal script in Terminal before it will open.

Lynkeos is the long-running native option. Jean-Etienne Lamiaud has maintained it for close to twenty years, and it does multi-point alignment: the v3.0 release notes from September 2018 record a new multiple points align. SER support arrived in 3.1, a SER exporter in 3.7, and version 3.6 brought a native ARM build. The current release is 3.10 from November 2025, running on Intel and Apple Silicon, macOS 10.13 and later. That deep OS compatibility makes it the obvious choice on hardware the newer apps have left behind.

Siril is the other one worth watching. Multi-point registration for planetary video was developed with the support of Rolf Hempel and has been merged into the 1.5 development cycle. In current stable releases the planetary registration methods are single point, which the Siril documentation itself describes as poorly suited to high definition planetary alignment. When 1.5 lands, that changes.

Putting a Mac workflow together

If you are starting from nothing and want to spend nothing, capture with AstroDMx Capture or FireCapture depending on your camera, then stack and sharpen in Planet Stacker X. That gets you a real planetary image tonight with no Terminal commands and no Windows.

If you want the shortest path with the fewest applications, capture in Laminar and process in Strata, which keeps everything native and hands SER files straight between the two. If you already own a stack you like, Strata reads SER from any capture tool, so nothing forces you to change how you shoot.

If you have older Intel hardware, Lynkeos is the most sensible native option, and FireCapture's Mac build will run without Rosetta.

What has actually changed since 2020 is not that one great application appeared. It is that the Mac now has several, at different price points, from different developers, and the answer to "can I do planetary imaging on a Mac" stopped requiring an apology.