Planetary imaging, finally native to the Mac.
Stack, sharpen, and derotate Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, the Moon, and the Sun — without Windows, without Wine, without leaving your desk. One app, one window, one GPU.
Free during beta · Requires Apple Silicon & macOS 14
The Problem
Planetary imaging on the Mac has been an afterthought.
The best stacking software runs on Windows. The best sharpening software runs on Windows. Derotation runs on Windows. The format converters that make all four talk to each other? Also Windows.
So Mac astronomers learned the workarounds. A Boot Camp partition that never quite worked. A Parallels VM that crashed mid-session. A second machine in the corner just to run AutoStakkert. Three apps in sequence — AutoStakkert for stacking, RegiStax for sharpening, WinJUPOS for derotation — each saving files to disk for the next one to find. None of them aware that the Apple Silicon chip in your Mac is faster at this kind of math than the PC you're emulating.
I got tired of telling Mac astronomers to just install Windows. Strata is what I built instead.
The Solution
Seven phases. One window. One GPU.
Strata brings the core of the planetary processing toolchain home to the Mac — stack, derotate, sharpen, color, export — in one Metal-accelerated app. For the work most planetary imagers do at the desk, you no longer need Windows. Walk the pipeline straight through, or jump to any phase with Cmd+1 through Cmd+7.
Already have a stacked image from somewhere else? Drop a TIFF or PNG straight into Sharpen and use Strata as a finishing tool.
Strata focuses on stacking, sharpening, derotation, and color. If your workflow relies on PIPP for high-volume timelapse batches, SER/AVI file repair, or image inversion, those remain PIPP's specialty — Strata isn't aiming to replace them.
Proof · Speed
The fastest planetary stacker on the Mac.
Every compute-heavy operation runs on the GPU through Metal. Unified memory means your frames never copy between CPU and GPU.
93×
faster stacking than CPU
Simple Average · 2,000 frames · Apple M1
Benchmarks — Apple M1, 16GB
| Operation | GPU (Metal) | CPU | Speedup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quality Analysis (10,000 frames) | 1,500 fps | ~60 fps | 25× |
| Simple Average Stack (2,000 frames) | 0.4s | ~37s | 93× |
| Strata Warp Stack (2,000 frames) | 4.2s | ~189s | 45× |
| Wavelet Sharpen | ~30ms | ~800ms | 27× |
| Solar Tone | ~40ms | ~1.5s | 38× |
| Wiener Deconvolution | ~55ms | ~5s | ~90× |
Real-world captures, not synthetic benchmarks. Your numbers will vary with file size, frame count, and stacking parameters.
Proof · Stacking
Strata Warp — the stacker built for Apple Silicon.
AutoStakkert pioneered alignment-point stacking on Windows nearly two decades ago. Strata Warp is my port of that idea to the GPU — rebuilt from scratch in Swift and Metal, tuned for the way Apple Silicon handles unified memory.
A uniform grid of alignment points lays over your frame. Each region is independently registered against a quality-scored reference, then accumulated with sub-pixel precision. The result recovers local detail that bulk-frame averaging blurs out — atmospheric seeing variation, residual drift, the slight misalignment that's invisible at full-frame scale but devastating at pixel level.
Three engines run under the hood — one tuned for planetary disks with a planet mask, one for the Moon's edge-to-edge surface, one for solar geometry with a limb-protection blend. You don't pick the engine. The imaging target you chose at Import does.
Proof · Derotation
Multi-image derotation, built in.
Jupiter rotates a full degree every 100 seconds. By the time you have six good captures across a thirty-minute session, the surface has shifted enough to smear together if you stack everything as one set. The same problem applies to Saturn and Mars over longer sessions.
The standard solution is WinJUPOS — a Windows app that mathematically de-rotates each stacked image back to a common reference time, then combines them. It works. It's also a separate app, on a separate operating system, with its own learning curve.
Strata handles derotation as a phase in the same window. Drop in your stacked Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars images, pick the imaging target, and Strata aligns and combines them with rotational compensation. No file shuffling. No WinJUPOS. No second machine.
Everything Else
The rest of the pipeline.
Three GPU-accelerated sharpening engines, target-aware UI, color science, and the workflow plumbing that makes a single capture or a folder of ten move through the pipeline cleanly.
Three Sharpening Engines
Wavelet, Wiener Deconvolution, and Solar Tone — pick the right one for your target, see results in real time on the GPU.
Target-Aware Pipeline
Twelve imaging targets — Jupiter through Neptune, the Moon, H-alpha, Calcium-K, and white-light Sun. Strata gates every phase to controls that actually apply.
Quality Analysis
GPU-scored frame ranking at 1,500 fps. Sort your 10,000-frame SER by sharpness in seconds, then stack only the best.
Software ADC & Auto Color
GPU-accelerated channel alignment via cross-correlation corrects atmospheric dispersion without a hardware ADC prism. One-click auto color balance handles the rest.
Full-Pipeline Profiles & Batch
Save Analyze, Stack, Sharpen, Color, and Export settings as a single profile. Queue up to 10 similar captures and run the full pipeline across all of them with one click.
Mineral Moon & Solar Tone
Pull titanium-rich blues and iron-rich oranges out of the lunar surface. Bring out granulation, sunspots, and prominences in H-alpha, Calcium-K, and white-light captures.
See It In Action
Processing a solar video with Solar Tone.
"Thank you so much for your effort in creating such an outstanding program. I'm blown away. Finally, I don't have to live with that cumbersome Parallels world anymore."
— Hardy
Beta tester · MacBook Air M3 · Lunar imaging
Compatibility
Input Formats
- SER
- AVI (ZWO RAW8)ASIAir & ASICap
- TIFF (8/16-bit)
- PNG
- FITSSingle image
Output Formats
- TIFF (8/16-bit)
- PNG
- FITS
- JPEG
Requirements
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Apple Silicon (M1+)
- Metal GPU
Pricing
Built by one Mac astronomer. One price. Every feature.
No subscriptions. No tiers. Buy once, own it forever.
Strata
$34.99
One-time purchase. Every feature included.
- ✓ SER & ZWO RAW8 AVI import
- ✓ Quality analysis (1,500 fps)
- ✓ Simple Average & Strata Warp stacking
- ✓ Drizzle super-resolution (1.5×/2×/3×)
- ✓ Wavelet, Deconvolution & Solar Tone
- ✓ Per-channel R/G/B sharpening
- ✓ Multi-image derotation
- ✓ Target-aware pipeline (12 targets)
- ✓ Full-pipeline profiles & batch
- ✓ Software ADC & auto color balance
- ✓ Mineral Moon & solar enhancement
- ✓ TIFF, PNG, JPEG & FITS export
Free during the public beta. App Store launch coming after Build 14 stabilization.
One Ecosystem
From photon to archive.
The Mac Observatory Suite covers the entire planetary imaging workflow. Capture in Laminar, stack and sharpen in Strata, catalog in Meridian.
Swift & SwiftUI · Apple Silicon Native · Metal GPU · No Subscriptions
Common questions about planetary image processing with Strata on macOS.