Earendel

The name

The most distant star ever seen needed a lens the size of a galaxy cluster.

Back in 2022, Hubble spotted a point of light that had set off on its journey 12.9 billion years earlier; a single star sitting at the very edge of the observable universe. They called it Earendel, Old English for morning star. On its own it's far too faint to see. The only reason it shows up at all is that a cluster of galaxies happens to sit in front of it, bending spacetime into a magnifying lens.

Your telescope's raw frames are full of light too faint to see. Earendel is the lens.

At first light

Everything your phone app does, on a screen that deserves it. Then everything it can't.

Live view, full screen

Both lenses, streamed straight to your Mac at full resolution. Focus with a magnified loupe and frame with a grid, on 27 inches instead of 6.

The Forge

Metal-accelerated stacking on Apple Silicon handles the lot: registration, sigma-clipped integration, stretch and background extraction. One click takes you from a night of subs to a finished image.

Sessions over Wi-Fi

Every frame your scope saves gets imported and organised into sessions on its own. No SD cards, no shuffling files about.

GoTo from your Mac

Pick a target and plate-solved pointing puts it in frame. Slew, centre and compose with the keyboard and trackpad.

Focus that behaves

Auto-focus, astro auto-focus, and manual with edge detection for when you want your hands on the wheel.

Properly native

SwiftUI, sandboxed, sold on the Mac App Store. Not a port or a webview, and no phone app stretched into a window.

Built for DWARF 3 and DWARF Mini, with Seestar S50 and S30 on the bench. Then iPad.

Why it matters

Your scope caught more than it kept.

The stack your telescope builds on board is made for a phone screen; it has to be quick and small, and done before you're back indoors. Getting there means throwing signal away. The raw frames it saved at the same time, the FITS files, still hold the faint arms, the outer shells and the dust.

The board inside your scope hasn't a patch on your Mac for raw computing power, and Earendel puts every bit of it to work on those frames. Same telescope, same night, more galaxy.

Free to download. The Forge unlocks for less than an eyepiece. No subscription required.

EARENDEL