Native planetary imaging capture for macOS and Apple Silicon
Laminar is the first planetary imaging capture app built natively for macOS. Record high-framerate SER video of Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and the Sun through your telescope with real-time frame quality analysis, atmospheric seeing scores, and automatic target tracking. Built in Swift with Metal GPU acceleration for Apple Silicon. Supports ZWO ASI and PlayerOne cameras. Free to download with an optional one-time Pro upgrade. A native Mac alternative to FireCapture and SharpCap.
Hey Product Hunt! I'm Andrew, a designer who taught himself Swift to solve a problem that's bugged me for years: there's no good native Mac app for planetary astrophotography.
Planetary imaging is a specific workflow -- you record thousands of video frames through a telescope, then stack the sharpest ones to cut through atmospheric turbulence. On Windows there are solid capture tools (FireCapture, SharpCap). On Mac, your options have been Wine wrappers or nothing.
Laminar is my answer to that. It's a native Swift/SwiftUI app that handles the capture side with a few things the Windows tools don't offer: a live frame quality graph so you can confirm focus while you're still at the telescope, atmospheric seeing scores before you set up, and automatic planet tracking that follows your target frame-by-frame.
This is a 1.0 -- I've kept the scope tight on purpose. No filter wheel or mount control yet. I'd rather get capture right first.
I'm also building a companion stacking app called Strata (currently in beta) so the full pipeline can stay on Mac.
Free to download, one-time $34.99 Pro upgrade for the advanced features. No subscription.
Happy to answer any questions about the app or the dev journey -- this was my first Mac app and building it with Claude Code has been quite an experience.
