Direct, unvarnished

Private beta with invitations sent by hand. Calibration, registration and integration are the settled part; the interface is still changing. There is no public download yet, and no fixed release schedule to promise you.

FITS and XISF are first-class for reading, and FITS is the working save format — linear pixels at full precision. Export is a separate step that writes TIFF, PNG or JPEG with the stretch you see baked into the pixels, because a screen stretch is display-only and a FITS saved after one still opens nearly black elsewhere. Camera raw files from Canon or Nikon are not read.

Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. There is no macOS or Linux build, and none is planned for the beta.

16 GB of RAM is a sensible floor; large mosaics want more. No GPU is required and none is currently used — processing runs on the CPU, and stacks larger than memory are handled in chunks rather than by loading everything at once.

No image data, ever — all processing is local and nothing is uploaded. The app does make three kinds of network request, and it is worth being precise rather than claiming "no cloud": checking whether a newer version exists, downloading a Gaia catalogue so plate solving can then run entirely offline, and signing in if you hold a licence. There is no analytics or usage tracking in the build.

Under %APPDATA%\AstrylStudio\, with a rotating log file in logs\. Help ▸ Export Diagnostics packages the logs and a crash report into a zip you can attach to a bug report — it is written locally, never uploaded, and deliberately leaves out your sign-in session and licence file.

By writing ordinary FITS and XISF with full headers, at whatever stage you want to hand off — calibrated, registered or integrated. Process logs are written next to the output. See Alongside for the three arrangements people actually use.

The beta is free while it is a beta. Pricing is not being announced on this page yet.