How to install Sequator in Linux

Sequator and Starry Landscape Stacker are the most popular software packages for landscape astrophotography.

These programs allow tracking stars on multiple images, aligning stars and stacking them. This strategy enables similar results to long-exposures with an equatorial mount by stacking non-blur star images in short-time exposures.

Sequator is only available for Windows systems, and Starry Landscape Stacker is only available for MacOS. In Linux, we have excellent astrophotography software packages for stacking astronomical images in Linux, like PixInsight, Astro Pixel Processor or SiriL. Unfortunately, none of those packages is designed for Landscape astrophotography.

This document provides the instructions required to use the free software Sequator in your Linux system. The following steps are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. If you use a different Linux distribution, replace the package installation with the one used in your distribution.

Figure 01: Images taken from Muriwai Gannet colony (Auckland, New Zealand) during one of the Skylabs NZ landscape astrophotography workshops.

Install Wine

sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine64 winbind winetricks

Setup Wine

winetricks -q vcrun2015

Download Sequator

Visit the Sequator website and download the latest stable release to the Downloads folder. At the time I was writing this tutorial, it was 1.6.0. Download also the logo of the program in PNG format and rename it to Sequator_logo.png

Create a new folder in Downloads called Sequator and move the two downloaded files to that folder.

Setup working directory

Transfer the software into the wine prefix using the following commands:

cd  ~/Downloads/Sequator
unzip Sequator160.zip
cd
mv ~/Downloads/Sequator .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/

Test it

Try running the following commands and loading some images for stacking:

cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sequator/
wine64 Sequator.exe

Setup desktop shortcut

Create a new file in the following path ~/.local/share/applications/Sequator.desktop with the content below.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Sequator
Comment=Landscape Astrophotography Stacking Software
Exec=wine64 /home/jordi/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sequator/Sequator.exe
Icon=/home/jordi/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sequator/Sequator_icon.png
Categories=Graphics;

Note that it requires the full path to the binary and icon. If you use the $HOME or ~ symbol, it won’t work.