The story
Three reasons, and none of them were "it would look nice".
Stacking is the most important thing in astrophotography, and the one people understand least. I kept repeating the same explanation: no, it isn't one long photo — it's hundreds of frames averaged together.
A video says it in ten seconds. You watch the noise fall away and you get it, without a single equation.
The SNR curve flattens. At some point another twenty minutes on the same target buys you almost nothing — and that time would be better spent elsewhere.
Seeing the measured curve next to the theoretical one tells you where that point is for your sky, your camera, your target — instead of guessing.
No editing app, no timeline, no export settings to fight with. The clip comes out vertical, the right length, ready for Instagram and TikTok.
Tag it #SNRflow so the rest of us can find your night.
I shoot deep-sky from Paris — which means a bright, heavily light-polluted sky, the kind where every extra hour of integration has to earn its place.
That constraint is exactly why the SNR curve matters so much to me: in a city, it is the number that tells you whether the night was worth it.
It started as a script for my own posts, then turned into a real tool. It is free for personal use, it runs entirely on your machine, and it never touches your images beyond reading them.
If something is missing or wrong, tell me — that is genuinely how it gets better.