Hi there, I'm David Partridge, the current lead developer for DeepSkyStacker. I live in PIllerton Priors (a small village in Warwickshire) in the UK.

As you may know we've been working for some time to make DeepSkyStacker portable by changing the code so that instead of MFC (which is Windows only) it uses the Qt framework which is designed for portability. We finally completed that conversion at around the end of November 2024.

We have now taken the first steps to a Linux build (the code compiles and runs on Linux, but lots of testing and other things still need to be done). Porting to macOS is also now being investigated (based on the Linux port). We anticipate delivering a Linux release in the first half of 2025, with a macOS version not long after that.

How will your contributions help?

1. It will help to pay for hardware needed for development on these new platforms: ARM based systems will be needed to support development for Windows 11 on ARM64 and macOS on ARM64. The obvious approach here would be to get an Mac Mini M4 as that would allow development for both macOS on ARM and Windows 11 on ARM (in a virtual machine). A Mac Mini M4 with sufficient disk space and RAM to support development for both environments will cost somewhere north of £1800 (about $2300).

If macOS on x64 is also wanted (likely) then that will add to the cost.

2. It will help pay for an Apple Developer license which is necessary to distribute code for Macs.

Total sponsorship to date (9 December 2024) is a bit over USD600, so any contribution you make will be most gratefully received.