PHD Guiding
PHD Guiding is designed to be “Push Here Dummy” simple, yet provide powerful, intelligent auto-guiding of your telescope for both PCs and Macs. Connect your mount, your camera, select a star, and start guiding. Voted the best software for guiding in the 2007 AstroPhoto Insight survey. [Free] |
DSLR Shutter
DSLR Shutter is designed to be a simple tool to capture long-exposure images from digital SLR cameras using their “bulb” setting. It allows you to specify the number of frames, their duration, and various delays to act as a software interval timer for your camera. [Free] |
Nebulosity
Nebulosity (Windows and OS X) is designed to be a powerful, but simple to use capture and processing application for a wide range of astronomy CCD cameras. Many cameras are supported for capture and images from just about anything can be processed (support for many FITS formats, PNG, TIFF, JPEG, CR2/CRW, etc). Its goal is to suit people ranging from the novice imager who wants to create their first images to the advanced imager who wants a convenient, flexible capture application for use in the field. In it, you get a host of purpose-built, powerful tools to make the most out of your images (e.g., Digital Development Processing, traditional alignment/stacking (equatorial and alt-az), Drizzle alignment/stacking, Bad Pixel Mapping, LRGB tools, real-time tricolor histograms for color balancing, star tightening via edge detection, adaptive scaling of stacks, Canon CR2/CRW RAW Bayer matrix loading, 32/96-bit accuracy, etc.) [Free] |
Craterlet
Craterlet is a capture application for the Orion StarShoot Solar System imager and for other cameras compatible with DirectX (DirectShow) and WDM (e.g., the ToUcam, Vesta, etc). It provides streaming to AVI and still capture. [Free] |
WCS
WCS helps you to polar align your mount using the drift alignment method with CCD or webcam support. It supports any camera which can be installed as a Windows device (Meade LPI, ToUcam, NexImage, etc). There’s also a version available for the Meade DSI cameras. The error in polar azimuth and polar elevation can be adjusted very quickly, even if Polaris is not visible (e.g. obstructing trees, buildings, or if observing in the southern hemisphere). The idea is to measure the star drift of an inaccurately aligned mount using a webcam, and to calculate the amount of polar axis misalignment. After that, it assists you in achieving near-perfect mount alignment using the webcam display. With WCS, the effort needed for alignment is reduced to a minimum, and you have more time for observing and imaging. [Free Trial] |
PEMPro
With PEMPro Version 2 you can now correct your mounts periodic error, polar alignment and backlash using your CCD Camera or Webcam to dramatically improve tracking and guiding. [Free Trial] |
Images PLUS
The premier program for DSLR camera control, image acquisition, calibration, alignment, stacking, processing and enhancing astrophotographs. If you can only afford one program, this is the one to get. Images Plus will not only control all of your camera’s functions through your computer, it will also help you focus your camera. Once you have acquired your images, it will calibrate and align them with a couple of clicks of your mouse. Then you can use it to apply advanced image correction and enhancement techniques such as digital development and deconvolution. |
IRIS
Iris offers numerous and powerful functions for image processing of digital astronomical images. It is particularly optimized to exploit the images that come from CCD or DSLR cameras. Iris can load and save images in the formats FITS, PIC (proprietary format), raw or BMP. [Free] |
AstroArt V3.00
Astroart 3.0 is a complete software for image processing, photometry, astrometry and image stacking for CCD and film images. Provides camera control for Starlight Xpress, SBIG, Audine/Genesis cameras amongst others. Various plug-in modules extend funtionality.A commercial product with a downloadable demo. |
AstroVideo V3.3.6
AstroVideo uses any Windows-compatible video capture device to create an effect similar to long exposure photography, by automatically integrating a large number of video frames. Astrovideo captures and superimposes hundreds of video frames to acheive far greater sensitivity than is normally possible with a low-cost video camera. |
AVIS Fits Viewer
Opens 8 & 16bit FITS files. Imports files from SBIG, Starlight Xpress, Hisis, Pixcell and other CCD cameras.Exports data to FITS, TXT, RAW, TIF, TGA, BMP and JPEG file formats.Freeware. |
FitsView
FITSview is available a number of computer systems. The viewer has easy to use graphical controls and will display astronomical images in the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) format (as saved by some CCD cameras) allowing zooming, scrolling, modifying the brightness, contrast and pseudo color and allow determination of celestial positions and the physical brightness units in the image. Both standard World Coordinate System (WCS) and Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) coordinates are supported. Positions and brightnesses of selected pixels may be logged to a text file and specified positions in the image may be marked. Images may be compared by “blinking” them and 3 dimensional images may be viewed a plane at a time or in the form of a movie. Blanked pixels and all defined FITS image data types are supported. |
Maxim DL
A complete image manipulation package for CCD and film images. Comes in two versions, one with CCD camera support (MaxIm DL/CCD) and another without. Camera support version supports CCD cameras from SBIG, Apogee, Starlight Xpress, Celestron, Meade and others.A commercial product with a downloadable demo. |
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Hi and thanks so much for all this info. I wonder if you could guide me to a software program that I am needing while researching stone circle construction. I need a program that I can put in a longitude and latitude and most importantly a ‘compass bearing’ that will show me the night sky on that compass bearing between 6000 bc or further back until today.So what were the ancestors looking at, at these locations and low moon sets, equinoxes etc? Does this program exist?
thanks so much
Jason
Hi Jason,
All planetarium software packages will allow you to input your latitude and longitude, and they’ll all allow you to change your view of the sky so you’re looking South, for example, or North East. Generally, they don’t provide a very precise compass bearing (i.e you can’t specify that you want to look at a bearing of 262 degrees) but you’ll be able to rotate the sky to look in the direction of interest.
Gary.
Great web site. Lots of helpful info here. I am sending it to several buddies ans also sharing in delicious. And obviously, thank you in your sweat!