SimpleStax is a pre-release for Linux (Debian / Ubuntu, x86-64). Galaxies, nebulae, star fields and the Milky Way work from start to end: plan, shoot, import, calibrate, stack and finish. Planetary and lunar stacking is coming later.
A good astrophoto from a plain tripod is dozens or hundreds of short exposures, plus dark, flat and bias frames to cancel the sensor's noise and the lens's vignetting and dust, all aligned and averaged. The tools that do this well ask you to understand every step before they give a result. SimpleStax walks the night in order — Plan, Shoot, Import, Calibrate, Stack, Finish — and picks the settings for the kind of subject you are shooting, so a first stack looks right without hand-tuning.
What it does
- Subject workflows for planetary and lunar, nebulae, galaxies, star fields and the Milky Way, each with its own frame counts and processing.
- A planning step that works out the longest untracked exposure for your camera and lens (the NPF rule), rounded down to a shutter speed the camera actually offers.
- A shooting checklist for the night: lights first, then darks, flats and bias.
- A frame library: pick a shot profile and a subject, and SimpleStax files the frames by night and kind, renames lights with the subject and date, and keeps darks and flats with the night they were shot so a summer and a winter session never share calibration.
- A frame picker that reads each RAW's EXIF and dims frames that don't match the profile, while still letting you pick frames from manual lenses that record nothing.
- Calibration with darks, flats and bias when you have them, and lights-only stacking when you don't. Untracked tripod frames are aligned on their stars, and satellites and hot pixels are rejected.
- Light-pollution gradient removal and the camera's own colour matrix, so the sky comes out flat and neutral.
- An automatic finish for the subject: black point, stretch, star colour, colour-noise reduction, saturation and green removal (SCNR), each set from the image and each on a slider before export.
- Exports a finished 16-bit TIFF and PNG, and keeps the linear FITS and TIFF for a full editor.
Who it is for
Photographers with a camera and a tripod who want to stack astrophotos on Linux without learning a professional pipeline first, and who want to see why each kind of frame is needed along the way.
Support
Questions, bugs and feature requests: gregorydearth@gmail.com.