Strata — Planetary Stacking

Strata takes a planetary, lunar, or solar capture from raw video to a finished image in one native macOS app: frame quality analysis, multi-point alignment, stacking, derotation, wavelet sharpening, color, and export. Every compute-intensive stage runs on the GPU through Metal.

A lucky-imaging workflow that has traditionally meant several Windows tools and a virtual machine runs here as a single guided pipeline. Drop in a capture of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, the Moon, or the Sun and work straight through to an export.

IMPORT

- SER video, the standard planetary capture format

- The uncompressed RAW8 AVI subset written by ZWO ASIAir and ASICap

- Already-stacked images (16-bit TIFF, PNG, JPEG, FITS) enter directly at Sharpen, so you can bring work in from other tools

- Truncated captures are recovered rather than rejected: if a recording was cut short, Strata reads every complete frame and tells you exactly how many it used

ANALYZE

- GPU frame quality scoring across every frame in a capture

- An interactive selection curve: watch quality fall away and set your keeper percentage against the data rather than a guess

- Normalize Capture, an optional hygiene pass for captures with brightness or level drift

BATCH ANALYSIS

- Score a whole night of captures at once and rank them in a single comparison table

- Quality curves, usable frame counts, and a suggested selection percentage per file, side by side

- Take your best capture through the full pipeline, then return to the table for the next one

STACKING

- Two stacking methods: Strata Warp for maximum quality, Simple Average for speed

- Strata Warp performs two-phase global alignment, refines local shifts at every alignment point, and selects frames per region, so different parts of the disc use their own best frames

- Automatic alignment point placement with filtering by brightness, contrast, and structure

- Automatic alignment point sizing, with Balanced and Poor Seeing profiles

- Feathered blending for seamless transitions between patches

- Drizzle super-resolution at 1.5x, 2x, and 3x for undersampled captures

SHARPENING

- Three engines: 6-layer wavelets, Wiener deconvolution with synthetic PSF modeling, and Solar Tone

- Multiple wavelet passes for compound sharpening, so fine detail can be drawn out gradually rather than forced in one step

- Micro Contrast for sub-pixel detail, applied after the main chain

- Work in Luminance or per-channel RGB, and choose which channels build luminance

- Real-time GPU preview: move a slider and see the result immediately

- Original, Enhanced, and split Comparison views

DEROTATION

- Combine multiple captures taken across a planetary rotation period

- Block-matching registration with a smooth displacement field

- A dedicated path for Saturn's rings

- No separate derotation tool needed, it is part of the pipeline

COLOR

- Automatic RGB channel alignment to correct atmospheric dispersion

- Histogram controls, saturation, and color balance

- Mineral Moon and solar color treatments

WORKFLOW

- A guided seven-phase pipeline: Import, Analyze, Stack, Derotate, Sharpen, Color, Export

- Processing profiles that record every setting and replay them on other files

- Folder batch processing: point Strata at a night's captures and let it run unattended

- Target detection from filenames (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Moon, Sun, and more)

- Export to 16-bit TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and FITS with filename templates

BUILT FOR THE MAC

- Native Swift and SwiftUI, not a port

- Metal GPU acceleration throughout

- Optimized for Apple Silicon

- Full keyboard shortcuts, light and dark appearance, and a built-in Help Book

Strata is the Process step in the Mac Observatory Suite, alongside Laminar for capture and Meridian for archiving. Each app works independently, no suite purchase required.

Requires macOS 14.6 or later and a Metal-capable GPU.