StarMax

Users who are passionate about night sky photography and prefer to shoot multiple exposures in order to generate star trails, know the difficulty that this task involves. One must use advanced photography techniques and later on process the resulted images by using complex image editing software.

StarMax is an application that was created to help astrophotography enthusiasts generate star trails easily, without the necessity of using complicated image processing packages. This compact package will provide users with the necessary tools for stacking and merging their exposures into a single image, which depicts the rotation of the night sky stars relative to the Earth’s position.

Amateur photographers and novice users must take into consideration that although being less complex than other image processing packages, this utility does require some background knowledge of astrophotography and image editing.

StarMax features a three section interface, where one will be able to input multiple images in the first section, process them according to the preferred settings in the second one and preview the individual resulted images in the third.

Together with the batch processing capabilities, the application offers numerous tools for sorting, filtering and selecting the files required for the stacking process. Each folder where the images are stored can be checked for errors and the application provides a useful preview tool. Using this tool, people can move the mouse cursor across the images required for processing and selectively preview how the image will look after the adjustments have been applied.

Another core feature offered by the application is the creation of a pseudo dark image, which will allow users to manipulate the exposures in order to easily and efficiently remove the annoying light pollution that occurs in night sky photography. Support is offered for multiple image formats: BMP, JPEG, PNG or TIFF.