Astronomy Image Processing Software For Mac

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These are some of the programs I use or have tried and recommend:

Mac support as with many pieces of astronomy software. General purpose image processing software very similar in capability to PhotoShop.

  • WcCtrl: helps to control the settings of several webcam models (freeware).
  • WcRmac: edits the firmware of several webcam models (freeware).
  • SkyChart: Sky map (freeware).
  • AutoStar Suite: Sky map from Meade.
  • Messier Marathon: generates a list of Messier objects visibles from your location (freeware).
  • NGC Observer: generates a list of objects from several catalogs (Messier, NGC, etc.) visibles from your location.
  • AstroPlanner: observation planner, much more more sophisticated than the previous. Free version with some limitations.
  • Bahtinov Grabbber: helps focusing using a Bahtinov mask (freeware).
  • EQAlign: scope polar aligning, periodic error analysis and autoguiding (freeware).
  • Desire: long exposure imaging with modified webcams (freeware).
  • K3CCDTools: photo and video acquisition, planetary image processing (freeware version). See my image processing video tutorial using this software.
  • Envisage: image acquisition, calibration, aligning and stacking for Meade DSI cameras.
  • MaxIm DL: image acquisition, calibration, aligning, stacking and post-processing.
  • DeepSkyStacker: image calibration, aligning and stacking specific for deep space astrophotography. See my image processing video tutorial using this software.
  • RegiStax: image calibration, aligning and stacking specific for planetary astrophotography. It can also be used for deep space astrophotography (freeware).
  • IMerge: makes astrophotography mosaics (freeware).
  • Focus magic: improves images focusing and contrast.
  • PixInsight LE: image post-processing (freeware version).
Other software quite popular but which I have not tested yet:
  • Photoshop: image post-processing.
  • Iris: image calibration, aligning, stacking and post-processing. (freeware).

Astro Pixel Processor or simply APP has been released on 2 june 2017 and is a fast-growing and complete Deep Sky Image Processing application with several new and innovative features. BBC Sky at Night Magazine First Light Software Review by Sara Wager. MicroObservatory Image 2.0 - astronomical image display program works with FITS and GIF images on PCs and Macs. Can also perform mathematical image processing operations on multiple images. PhAst - A flexible IDL tool to display and analyze FITS images. Lynkeos is a Cocoa (Mac OS X) application dedicated to the processing of astronomical (mainly planetary) images taken with a webcam through a telescope. It runs on Intel Macintoshes. It is optimized for vectorized instructions sets (SSE) and for multi-processor and multi-core machines.

Introducing PIPP - Planetary Imaging PreProcessor

PIPP is a Windows application designed for pre-processing planetaryimages before stacking them with image stacking software such as Registax. PIPP's main purpose is to crop each image frame and select only the best quality frames to reduce the memory and processing requirements of the stacking software. For example, this would allow the best 1500 frames from a 7200 frame AVI (2 minute AVI at 60 fps) to be cropped ready for stacking by Registax. On my PC, Registax does not handle AVI files with that many frames but can easily handle 1500 pre-processed bitmap files so this is very useful.

PIPP was originally written to speed up the my own processing of the multitude large AVI files that that eachplanetary imaging session seems to generate. Now that PIPP has reached the point where it does actually speedup my processing workflow I decided to make it available to others to see if they find it useful and maybe give a little back to the astronomy community.

Astronomy Image Processing Software For Mac Os

PIPP's functions:

Astronomy Image Processing Software For Mac
  • Load a sequence of images from supported video files, SER video filesor TIFF/BMP/FITS/JPEG/RAW camera image files.
  • Calibrate frames with dark, flat and dark flat calibration frames.
  • Debayer raw frames from colour cameras toproduce colour frames.
  • Check each frame contains a planet that iscompletely on the image and discard any frames that do not.
  • Check for and discard overexposed frames.
  • Centre the planet in the frames.
  • Offset the centred planet.
  • Crop each frame around the centred planet.
  • Apply a fixed gain to each frame.
  • Apply a fixed gamma correct to each frame.
  • Apply a median noise filter to each frame.
  • Stretch histogram for each frame (equalising R, G and B channels for colour images).
  • Estimate the quality of each frame and reorderthe processed frames in order of quality.
  • Keep only the number of best quality framesspecified by the user.
  • Split colour frames into R, G and B frames.
  • Save processed frames as a sequence of TIFF/BMP/FITS image files, as a single AVI/SER video file ready for stacking or archiving or as an animated GIF for sharing online.

PIPP's functionality continues to be extended over time.


Supported Platforms

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Current supported platforms:

Astronomical Image Processing Software

  • Windows XP with Service pack 3 or all later versions of Windows.
  • Linux with Wine (See Installing PIPP on Linux with Wine.).
  • macOS with Wine (See Installing PIPP on macOS with WineBottler).

An updated version of PIPP that will run natively on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows is currently being worked on. Here are a few features of this version in case anyone in interested:

Astronomy Image Processing Software Free

  • All C# .net code to be replaced with C++ code so the entire program will be C++.
  • The Qt framework to be used for cross platform GUI support.
  • Improved integration between the GUI and the core code will hopefully allow a more natural user interface to run (no need for the 'Test Options' button).
  • Support for languages other than English will be added. This will require some volunteer translators!
  • This version will be released under an open source license so that other developers will be able to contribute bug fixes and new features.
  • A large rewrite of the internal code to tidy it up before releasing the source.

This work is taking longer than hoped, but it is now PIPP's highest development priority.


Astronomy Image Processing Software

Acknowledgements

Thanks for Martin Lewis (http://www.skyinspector.co.uk/) for all his help with testing PIPP, his feedback and suggestions have been invaluable.

Thanks also to Anthony Wesley for permission to usethe quality estimation source code from his Ninox planetary imagingsoftware (http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/software/ninox/) in PIPP. This is the basis for PIPP's quality estimation algorithm. In truth, although PIPP has moved on quite a bit now, it was originally inspired by Ninox.

Thanks also go to Heiko Wilkens, author of the LucamRecorder image acquisition software (http://www.lucamrecorder.de),for permission to incorporate his proprietary SER video format in PIPP.

Thanks go out to Dave Coffin for all his work on DCRAW and making the code available for others to use. This is the code that enables PIPP to decode almost any camera raw image format.