Nightlux vs Starlapse
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Nightlux
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Nightlux turns your phone into a serious night sky camera — capture the Milky Way, moonlit detail, and flowing star trails without a tripod, filters, or a manual-only learning curve. CAPTURE MODES • Night Mode — real-time multi-frame stacking brightens the sky and cuts through noise, so low-light scenes come out clean instead of grainy. • Moon Mode — auto zoom and sharpening lock onto lunar detail with a guide overlay to help you frame the shot. • Star Trail — interval capture blended into one flowing long-exposure-style composite. • Astro Filters — cinematic color grading presets (Deep Space, Aurora, Warm Night, Cinematic Blue) built for night sky tones. • Manual Pro — full exposure control plus simulated ISO, brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth. • Video — straightforward recording when you just need footage, no effects attached. SKY AI ENHANCER Send any capture through a cloud-based enhancement pass that reduces noise, lifts star and Milky Way visibility, and deepens blacks — while staying photorealistic. BUILT FOR NIGHT SHOOTERS • Live histogram and focus tools so you can trust what you're seeing before you shoot. • A dedicated gallery for everything you capture, with instant save to your Photos library. • Clean, distraction-free interface designed around dark environments. FREE TO START Manual and Video modes are free forever — no account, no subscription required. Upgrade any time to unlock Night, Moon, Star Trail, Astro Filters, and the Sky AI Enhancer. Subscription Information: - Nightlux Pro is available as weekly, monthly, and yearly auto-renewable subscriptions, plus a one-time lifetime purchase. - Payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at confirmation of purchase. - Subscriptions automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. - Your account will be charged for renewal within 24 hours prior to the end of the current period. - You can manage and cancel subscriptions in your App Store account settings after purchase. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://zenvorastudioapps.blogspot.com/2026/08/privacy-policy.html
Starlapse
Capture stunning long-exposure night sky photos with advanced manual controls and frame stacking. This app offers precise focus on starlight, a meteor detector, and celestial aiming overlays for astrophotography on your phone.
- Manual camera controls (ISO, shutter, focus, white balance)
- Autofocus on starlight
- Frame stacking for long exposures
- Pinpoint stars and star trails modes
- Night time-lapse creation
- Meteor detector
- Celestial aiming overlays
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Photograph the night sky properly, on a phone that was never meant to. Starlapse locks the camera and keeps it locked. ISO, shutter, focus, white balance — set them once and they stay there for the whole session. No creeping exposure, no autofocus hunting in the dark and landing on nothing, no auto white balance turning the sky orange under a streetlight. Then it does the thing the hardware cannot do alone. An iPhone sensor caps a single frame at about one second, so exposures longer than that are built by stacking hundreds of frames. That is not a workaround — it is better. Noise falls as the square root of the frame count, and the same night's light can be developed as pinpoint stars or as star trails afterwards, because nothing is thrown away. WHAT IT DOES • Manual camera that holds — ISO, frame exposure, focus, white balance, lens choice • Autofocus on starlight — steps the lens and measures star size, the way observatories focus • Self-timer, 3 or 10 seconds, so touching the phone does not shake the first frames • Stacking from 10 seconds to a full hour of collected light • Pinpoint stars — frames aligned on the stars themselves, so they stay points • Star trails — the sky's rotation drawn as arcs, ground kept sharp • Night time-lapse where every frame of the video is its own stack • Meteor detector — watches the sky and saves a short clip around anything that crosses it • Aiming overlay showing planets, bright stars and the Moon — tap any of them for its name, constellation and brightness WHERE TO POINT Most apps show you where a shower's radiant is. Starlapse tells you where to aim, which is not the same place: meteors streak away from the radiant, so the longest trails appear 40° off to the side. It works that out from your location and the time, keeps you clear of the Moon, and picks a height a tripod can actually hold. FOCUS, WHICH IS THE HARD PART Autofocus cannot see a night sky — there is no contrast to hunt on — and the infinity mark is not exactly infinity: it is a mechanical end stop, and the sharp point sits slightly inside it, at a place that differs between lenses and drifts as the phone cools. Starlapse steps the lens across its range, measures how large the stars come out at each position, and settles on the smallest. It takes about a minute. DEVELOP AFTERWARDS The stack is kept as accumulated light, not as a finished picture. When the exposure ends you can move the curve — stretch, black point, exposure, saturation — and it re-develops from the original data. Same latitude a RAW file gives you, which matters when you are judging a night sky on a phone screen in the dark. The curve is asinh, the one professional astronomical imaging uses. It lifts the faint Milky Way out of the noise while bright stars keep their cores and their colour instead of clipping to white discs. HONEST LIMITS • Aperture is fixed on iPhone. It is a property of the lens, not a setting. The app shows the f-number and what each lens gives up, and lets you choose — that is all any app can do here. • A single frame is about one second. Everything longer is stacked, and the interface always shows the arithmetic: "10 min of light = 600 × 1.00s". • Capture cannot run in the background. iOS stops the camera when an app leaves the screen. Starlapse keeps the screen on and dims it instead. • You need a tripod. An hour of stacking on a handheld phone is an hour of nothing. PRIVACY No account, no server of ours. Location and motion are used on the device to work out where to aim, and never leave it. Two things leave the phone: the optional purchase below, to Apple, and a usage counter you can switch off. The source is public: github.com/fortunto2/starlapse. STARLAPSE PRO Everything above is free and stays free. Pro is the sky's events, bought once: tonight's showers with their rates, the aim target 40° off the radiant and clear of the Moon, and peak nights. Comets, eclipses and dark frames join Pro at no further cost.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: Starlapse at none against Nightlux's shown. Starlapse also leads on update cadence (every 5 days vs every 2 weeks). Nightlux's advantage is device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 18.0). On price and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Nightlux sells 5 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per 7 days and Starlapse sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Nightlux ships an update every 2 weeks, Starlapse every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 14, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Nightlux | Starlapse |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | — | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | — | 1 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | — | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 54 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Mei Demiyanti | Rustam SALAVATOV |
In-app purchases
Nightlux
- AstroCam Weekly$3.997 Days
- AstroCam Monthly$6.991 Month
- AstroCam Yearly$34.991 Year
- 5 Sky AI Tokens$1.99
- AstroCam Lifetime$69.99
Starlapse
- Starlapse Pro$4.99








