It's been a good three years now since I swapped my HP laptop for a Macbook Pro. In the mean time, I've started doing a bit more astrophotography and of course the change of operating system has affected the tools I use to obtain and process photos.
Amateur astronomers have traditionally mostly used Windows, so there are a lot of Windows tools, both freeware and payware, to help. I used to run the freeware ones in Wine on Ubuntu with varying levels of success.
When I first got the Mac, I had a lot of trouble getting Wine to run reliably and eventually ended up doing my alignment and processing manually in The Gimp. However, that's time consuming and rather fiddly and limited to stacking static exposures.
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However, I've recently started finding quite a bit of Mac OS based astrophotography software. I don't know if that means it's all fairly new or whether my Google skills failed me over the past years :-)
Software
Hardware specific Mac software applications: Open PECTool: Celestron mount PEC recording tool. ASI Studio: ZWO imaging suite, live stacking, planetary capture, and DSO capture. QSEye: Quantum Scientific Imaging software. PoleMaster: QHY Polemaster software. IOptron iPolar: iOptron’s polar.
I thought I'd document what I use, in the hope that I can save others who want to use their Macs some searching.
Some are Windows software, but run OK on Mac OS X. You can turn them into normal double click applications using a utility called WineSkin Winery.
Obtaining data from video camera:
- oaCapture (MacOS X, free)
- AstroImager (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Format-converting video data:
- Handbrake (Mac OS X, free, open source)
Free Apps For Mac Computer
Processing video data:
- AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)
Obtaining data from DSLR:
- AstroDSLR (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Processing and stacking DSLR files and post-processing video stacks:
- RegiStax (Windows + Wine, free)
- Nebulosity (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Post-processing:
- The Gimp (Max OS X, free, open source)
Telescope guiding:
- AstroGuider (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
- PHD2 (Mac OS X, free, open source)
Hardware
A few weeks ago I bought a ZWO ASI120MC-S astro camera, as that was on sale and listed by Nebulosity as supported by OSX. Until then I'd messed around with a hacked up Logitech webcam, which seemed to only be supported by the Photo Booth app.
I've not done any guiding yet (I need a way to mount the guide scope on the main scope - d'oh) but the camera works well with Nebulosity 4 and oaCapture. I'm looking forward to being able to grab Jupiter with it in a month or so and Saturn and Mars later this year.
The image to the right is a stack of 24x5 second unguided exposures of the trapezium in M42. Not too bad for a quick test on a half-moon night.
Settings
I've been fiddling with Nebulosity abit, to try and get it to stack the RAW images from my Nikon D750 as colour. I found a conversion matrix that was supposed to be decent, but as it turns out that made all images far too blue.
![Free Astronomy Apps For Mac Free Astronomy Apps For Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126389278/223779321.jpg)
The current matrix I use is listed below. If you find a better one, please let me know.
R | G | B | |
---|---|---|---|
R | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 |
G | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.00 |
B | 1.00 | 0.00 | 0.50 |
features
sky
- default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
- extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars
- default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
- extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects
- asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
- constellations for 20+ different cultures
- images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
- realistic Milky Way
- very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
- the planets and their satellites
interface
- a powerful zoom
- time control
- multilingual interface
- fisheye projection for planetarium domes
- spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
- all new graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
- telescope control
visualisation
- equatorial and azimuthal grids
- star twinkling
- shooting stars
- tails of comets
- iridium flares simulation
- eclipse simulation
- supernovae and novae simulation
- 3D sceneries
- skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection
customizability
- plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope configuration and more
- ability to add new solar system objects from online resources...
- add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...
news
system requirements
minimal
- Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; Mac OS X 10.12.0 and above
- 3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.3
- 512 MiB RAM
- 250 MiB on disk
- keyboard
recommended
- Linux/Unix; Windows 7 and above; Mac OS X 10.12.0 and above
- 3D graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.3 and above
- 1 GiB RAM or more
- 1.5 GiB on disk
- keyboard
developers
Project coordinator: Fabien Chéreau
Graphic designer: Johan Meuris, Martín Bernardi
Developer: Alexander Wolf, Guillaume Chéreau, Georg Zotti, Marcos Cardinot
Continuous Integration: Hans Lambermont
Tester: Khalid AlAjaji
and everyone else in the community.
Graphic designer: Johan Meuris, Martín Bernardi
Developer: Alexander Wolf, Guillaume Chéreau, Georg Zotti, Marcos Cardinot
Continuous Integration: Hans Lambermont
Tester: Khalid AlAjaji
and everyone else in the community.
social media
collaborate
You can learn more about Stellarium, get support and help the project from these links:
git
The latest development snapshot of Stellarium is kept on github. If you want to compile development versions of Stellarium, this is the place to get the source code.
irc
Real time chat about Stellarium can be had in the #stellarium IRC channel on the freenode IRC network. Use your favorite IRC client to connect to chat.freenode.net or try the web-based interface.
supporters and friends
Download Free App For Mac
Stellarium is produced by the efforts of the developer team, with the help and support of the following people and organisations .