SharpStacker vs LightTide

SharpStacker turns a series of night-sky exposures into a single clean, detailed image. By aligning and stacking your shots, it reduces noise and reveals faint detail — stars, the Milky Way and deep-sky objects — that a single frame can't capture. It's built to make astrophotography stacking accessible to everyone: a deliberately simple interface gives you an immediate, intuitive workflow — without the cost or complexity of traditional desktop software. Full RAW support preserves maximum quality from capture to export. The blending mask is generated automatically by a machine-learning model — or drawn by hand — and can be fine-tuned manually for full control. • Full RAW import • Automatic star alignment and stacking • Noise reduction through stacking • ML-generated mask, editable by hand • Simple, immediate workflow • iPhone, iPad and Mac • On-device processing — your photos never leave your device Import your exposures, start the stack, and export a cleaner, more detailed night sky.

Drag the time bar and the light moves across the map. Golden hour, blue hour and the Milky Way window on one screen, in the local time of the point you pick. No account, no server of ours. Your coordinates stay on the phone, and the calculations keep running where there is no signal. A map where the light moves Drag the time bar and the sky over the map, the lines pointing to the sun and the moon, and the band the Milky Way traces all move to that moment together. It is not a table of times: you run a finger across a whole day of light. A short haptic marks the moment you cross into golden hour or out of it. Nothing animates on its own — the light moves while your finger does. Tonight's Milky Way window The hours when the galactic core sits above the horizon and the sky is dark enough that astronomical twilight has ended. You get the direction and the altitude of the core at its highest point, and where the moon stands over it: No moonlight, Faint moonlight or Strong moonlight. Moon and season Moon phase, moonrise and moonset, plus a season calendar that lays out a month one night at a time. Among the nights the Milky Way is up, pick the nights with little moonlight and set your shoot date. Spots and heads-ups Save the places you shoot from. Each one lists today's golden hour and Milky Way window in a single line. Notifications before evening golden hour and before the Milky Way rises are optional. Checked, not guessed Positions of the sun, the moon and the galactic core are computed with established astronomical algorithms (the NOAA solar equations and Meeus) and checked against published sunrise and sunset times. Every definition the app uses is written out in Settings. On a night the Milky Way stays down you get the reason — the latitude is too high for the core, the sky never gets dark enough, the season is wrong — and the next chance. Weather is not part of this LightTide tells you where the sun, the moon and the galactic core are, and when. Clouds and light pollution sit outside the math, so nothing here is promised as visible; reading the sky that night is yours to do. Privacy No account. No usage tracking. No server of ours. The only network traffic is map tiles, and LightTide has the map provider's usage tracking switched off. Fetching tiles does tell that provider which area you are viewing — true of every app that draws a map. Once the tiles are cached, the app keeps working at a trailhead with no bars.