StackingWizard beta 2026-08-25 (Beta 2.1: what the testers found)
Pre-release
StackingWizard public beta - build 2026-08-25 (Beta 2.1: what the testers found)
A quiet fix build. Sixteen repairs from the beta's second week, three of them undoing damage the last build did.
WHAT CHANGED
Hot pixels can no longer pose as stars. A sensor's dead pixels sit at the same coordinates on every frame, so on soft or defocused data the wizard could match them perfectly, compute an alignment that moved nothing, and stack the whole night unshifted - while reporting a fine result. A real star lights its neighbours; a dead pixel does not. An impossibly perfect alignment is now flagged as a warning rather than a triumph.
Blank frames and stray finished stacks stop being crowned. Our idea of "best" was really "least noisy", so a frame with nothing in it beat every real one and became the reference nothing could match.
Network drives work again. The working files land on a local disk now, created the ordinary way, and the space needed is shown before you begin. The silent drop to half precision when disk was tight is gone.
Your stacks know where they were pointing - coordinates, date, focal length, pixel size, camera, filter, frame count and integration time all travel with the file, so it plate solves. A colour camera whose pattern we cannot read is stacked as mono out loud rather than silently.
One wandering frame no longer crops the picture in half. The column headings stay put while the list scrolls (and reveal that those columns were always sortable). Previews stop shrinking as the stack builds. The running tally is back beside the time remaining. The wizard explains itself when it sets frames aside, and names a frame that does not belong. No more name.fits.fits.
KNOWN ISSUES are listed on the StackingWizard page - the grading list still struggles past about 500 frames, the grading cannot yet see a tree or a satellite trail, and combining still crops to the field the stacks share. All being worked on.
Windows 10/11: StackingWizard.exe - nothing to install. If Windows says "protected your PC": More info > Run anyway.
macOS (Apple Silicon): StackingWizard-mac.zip - unzip it and open it. Signed and notarised, so nothing else to do.
SHA-256:
- StackingWizard.exe 5e9623bba2b07eb5a911b5aeb8f629d9f23733b8eb50e4b54a72b41a1c2c1b91
- StackingWizard-mac.zip b42c1c02d24416e0ce0b10204b547ae335b7e9e8d42441b884043b165fa668b8
Free for everyone, founded on kindness. Reports: wizard@lukomatico.com - press "copy the receipts" on The Stack page first.