Installation Overview
Installing Homebrew
Install Python
Installing Sirilic
Running Sirilic

In this article we will walk through Installing Sirilic on Mac in three easy steps. First, what is Sirilic? It is highly likely that if you are reading this article you are already familiar with Siril, the astronomical image processing tool. Sirilic is an interactive processing tool which provides additional functionality to that found within Siril. Sirilic allows you to process mult-night sessions all at once. I really couldn’t do without having Sirilic available as my primary processing method in my workflow, almost all of my object sessions span multiple nights. Additionally, Sirilic supports multiple object sessions processed at once. Sirilic works with DSLR, color and monochrome CCD / CMOS cameras, all alike. In the following paragraphs I will take you through the process for installation on Mac OS. There is not a DMG available at this time for Sirilic, so it is necessary to install some prerequisites in order to use the Sirilic Python package, available from their website.

Installation Overview

The three steps needed to install Sirilic on Mac are to install Homebrew package manager so that we can easily install Python, which is the primary prerequisite dependency for installation and running Sirilic on Mac. Once we have installed Homebrew, the package manager for Mac, we can install Python. Once Python is installed using Homebrew, we will have the PIP package manager available to us in order to install Sirilic. Each of these steps is very simple so don’t feel daunted by using the Mac Terminal. I will provide you with the links to documentation and commands to enter into Terminal below, in each step of the process.

Installing Homebrew

We can get the necessary installation command from the Homebrew Main Page. Navigate to the Homebrew site home page and locate “Install Homebrew” near the top of the page. There you will find the following cURL command which when run within Terminal, will install Homebrew on your machine. I will provide the command here but I suggest grabbing it from their site in case it were to ever change in the future:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Copy and paste the command into your Terminal and press your Return key to issue the command to install Homebrew. Acknowledge any prompts, if there are any, and await a few moments for the installation to complete. Once done, check to ensure that the Homebrew package manager has installed successfully by simply checking for the installed version. You can so this using the following command:

brew --version

The result will look something like this, your version may differ from my example here:

Homebrew 4.1.16

If you see a version returned, such as in my example, you have successfully installed Homebrew on your machine and are now able to install, update, and remove programs using this package manager.

Install Python

Now that you have Homebrew installed, installing Python couldn’t be easier. You can find the Homebrew Python documentation Here. However, for our purposes we simply need to issue a very simple command within Terminal to complete the installation.

brew install python 

That’s it! By issuing the brew command you are asking Homebrew to install Python for you. This will only take a few seconds to complete. Just paste that into your Terminal and press your Return key. Once complete, check for successful installation of Python the same way we did above checking the Homebrew installation.

python3 –version

In this case we are typing “python3” with the version flag to get the installed Python version. We are calling it by the name python3 because that is the name Homebrew installed the python package. An additional note is that by not defining a specific version in the install command, Homebrew returned the latest Python version to us. Sirilc requires a minimum of Python 3.5 and suggest ideally version 3.7. If your version check returned something like the following, you have successfully installed Python:

Python 3.11.6

Installing Sirilic

That wasn’t so hard so far, was it?! The next step is just as simple. When we installed Python, we also got the PIP package manager that allows us to install python packages from Terminal. Just like Homebrew, PIP allows us to install, update, and remove packages from our system. In this case we want to install Sirilic. First, we need to download the Sirilic Python package from the Siril GitLab Repository. Find the Downloads section at the top, these are the latest versions. Within the Downloads list, find the Python package download link, this is the one we want. Download the Python Sirilic package to a place on your computer where you wish to keep this installation. For me, I keep software like this within my Astrophography directory so all related things are in the same place. You can put this file anywhere you like though, so whatever works for you.

Next, we need to change working directory in Terminal to the location where you have your newly downloaded Siril package. To do this we use the cd command within terminal, followed by the path to the directory where you wish to change to. This will look something like the following:

cd /Users/[your_user_name]/Path/To/Sirilic

When you have successfully changed working directories, you will see the directory listed to the left of your command prompt as the current working directory. Once you are in the desired current working directory, you can now issue the command to install Sirilic.

We can find an example of the installation command on the Sirilc Documentation Page. Scroll down to the Installation section and find the following under “On Arch Linux” heading. The command on Mac OS is virtually the same.

We need to make some modifications to the installation command. First, sudo (super user) is not necessarily needed. It is used to pefrorm an operation on protected files and folders or to install software globally on your machine (available to all users). If you do not need to do that then there is no need to use the sudo command. Secondly, pip was installed via Homebrew as pip3. You can double check the pip installation by entering the following version check:

$ pip3 --version

You should receive the pip3 version back in the result from that command. At this time you are ready to install Sirilic. In Terminal, enter the following command, changing the Sirilic version to the same name which you downloaded. You can use the tab key in Terminal while typing to autocomplete paths and filenames, so you could type pip3 install sir… and then press the tab key and Terminal should autocomplete the rest of the filename for you. If not, keep typing more letters and pressing Tab. If nothing is found then you may not be in the correct working directory, which should be the same place Sirilic is intalled. You can manually type the entire command such as the following (modify to your own file name):

$ pip3 install sirilic-[version_number].whl 

Press enter after making the modification to filename and Sirilic will be installed!!

Running Sirilic

With those steps completed, you are now ready to run Sirilic! This is the simplest step of them all. All you need to do is type in the following command in Terminal and press Return:

$ sirilic

That’s it! The Sirilic GUI should have launched and Sirilic is now running. You should see the following window open:

Wrap Up

So there you have it, Installing Sirilic On Mac In Three Easy Steps! Now that you have Sirilic running, you will be able to process multi-night sessions, multi-objects at once, view and customize scripts, and much more! Getting into Sirilic usage is out of scope of this article but let me direct you to a processing video that I did where I captured and processed multi-nights of the Western Veil Nebula!

Thank you so much for stopping by! If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or just want to say Hi, feel free to comment below. I invite you to subscribe, you can do that in the subscribe box at the top of the sidebar, you will then receive notifications of new articles when I post them.

Cheers!