The Macintosh in Amateur Astronomy
This page made with several Macs and a couple of telescopes.
The Emission Nebula Messier 42 in Orion’s Sword
Made in the UFO on Friday, January 28, 2005.

Above and below: Although most of the equipment that I used to make the photograph at the top of this page is not visible in these photos, here is a list of major components:
• The camera is a Canon 20D. I captured the image on a Macintosh PowerBook running Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software. The 20D has a Canon Angle Finder C and a Canon TC-80N3 remote timer attached. The remote timer is needed to make long exposures because Digital Photo Professional cannot control the camera with the mirror locked up or for exposures longer than 30 seconds. An image such as the one at the top of the page is typically made of a combination, or “stack” of any number of exposures of from three to five minutes in duration. The camera is powered by a Canon AC-DC converter; batteries don’t last long in the cold.
• The telescope through which the photo was made is a TeleVue 76 Apochromatic refracting telescope.
• The TeleVue 76 is mounted piggyback on a Meade LX200GPS reflecting telescope.
• The computer is a 17" Macintosh PowerBook. The PowerBook connects to my network via an AirPort Express 802.11g device that is configured to act as a relay (WDS) for my AirPort Extreme wireless network. I move my captured images from the PowerBook to an iMac or a Dual G5 in the house; clear skies are too scarce, and it’s too cold in the winter, to spend time in the observatory processing images. If I collect a great deal of data I transfer it via an iPod. I review and sometimes process my astrophotos on the iMac; in most cases, I also move the captured images to a Dual G5 Macintosh with a 30" Cinema Display, and that is where I do my heavy-duty Photoshop magic. The Dual G5 has over a terabyte of storage for my images as well as the (non astronomical) digital videos that I make. Among the astronomical software that I use is a utility that turns the entire PowerBook display dark red so that it interferes less with dark-adapted eyes. While observing I sometimes throw an old towel (on the shelf at right) over the display to darken it completely.
• Everything that requires power, including the Canon 20D, is powered by plug-in DC converters. The ambient temperature at the time I made the M42 photograph was 0° F, and batteries discharge very quickly at such temperatures. Laptops cannot be left in the observatory in this kind of weather; the “L” in “LCD Display” is liquid, and liquid freezes in the cold and expands to burst its container.
• The image was processed in Photoshop CS. Of all the good reasons for choosing to run Photoshop under the Mac OS, the inclusion of the Mac OS’s ColorSync color management software, which ensures a consistent and accurate color workflow from camera (or original artwork) to press or inkjet printer or Web, is near the top.


A Sampling of Astronomy Software and Resources for Apple Macintosh Computers
APOD Grabber Retrieves (via the Internet) and displays the Astronomical Picture of the Day. Free.
Applelust Scitech Web site. Science—including astronomy—on the Mac.
Astro IIDC FireWire Webcam Control. Used by Alan Friedman for images like this and this. 'Nuf said.
AstroPlanner Observation planning and telescope control. Highly recommended. Can communicate with Equinox.
Astrostack Java-based image stacker-combiner. Free.
BTVPro Captures QuickTime video from FireWire or USB webcams. Requires drivers from iOXperts.
Celestia 3D Solar-System and space simulation. Free.
DarkAdapted X Turns your display red (or green) to preserve night vision.
Einstein@Home Help in the search for gravity waves. “Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.” Free.
Equinox Planetarium and telescope control. Control for webcams and SBIG CCD cameras. Can communicate with Astroplanner. Developer has released a Universal Binary for Mactel, though it is still in development and does not yet have all of the functionality of the original.
FreeFall Earth satellite orbit and ground-track display application and screen saver.
iAstroPhoto Focusing assistance for Canon digital SLR’s. The author was inspired by DSLR Focus for Windows. The author is working on support for the 20D.
iCCD Contol Starlight Express CCD cameras. See the U.K. manufacturer’s site and the U.S. distributor’s site. iCCD is the work of Jeff Terry, who was the organizer of The Macintosh Astronomy Workshop I, that was held at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago on September 8, 2005. I attended.
ImageJ An image processing app from the National Institutes of Health. Originally Mac-only, it is available as an installable Mac app, or as a cross-platform Java app. Free.
iOXperts FireWire and USB webcam drivers for OS X; also an 802.11 driver for otherwise unsupported cards in a PowerBook.
IRAF Mactel beta available. “IRAF is the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility, a general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of scientific data. IRAF is written and supported by the IRAF programming group at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona. IRAF includes a good selection of programs for general image processing and graphics applications, plus a large number of programs for the reduction and analysis of optical astronomy data within the NOAO package.” In other words, IRAF is professional-grade astronomical image processing software. IRAF is available as an OS X package (easy install) or as Unix application to be used under Apple’s X11 environment. The Mac package download is here; general information is here, and a very good FAQ is here. This is serious software with a serious learning curve.
Keith’s AstroImager Webcam control and autoguiding (for Meade LX200-compatible telescopes). Free.
Keith’s Image Stacker Stacking and combining of still images or QuickTime videos. $10 shareware and worth every penny!
Lynkeos Stacking and combining of still images or QuickTime videos. Free.
The MacDob Project Works with third-party servo hardware to control a Dobsonian telescope (“Dob”). Can even control a Dob via a bluetooth-enabled cell phone!
MoonMenu Displays information on current, past, and future lunar phases.
Mars24 Java-based sunclock for Mars, showing graphical representations of the planet’s position relative to Earth. Also available: Titan24. Free from NASA.
Observing Logs Various observing logs in database format. Free.
Scope Calculator Calculates and compares field of view, magnification, and exit-pupil size for telescope eyepieces. Free.
The Sky, from
Software Bisque
Planetarium and telescope control. The current version is for OS 9 and previous, but Software Bisque is committed to bringing its software—TheSky, CCDSoft, and TPoint—to the Mac as Universal Binaries. Bisque demonstrated an early version of TheSky 7 on a 20" Mactel iMac at NEAF in May, 2006, and it was impressive. ( See my report on NEAF 2005 here.) No date has been announced for the release of these products, but sometime in 2007 is a reasonable guess for TheSky 7. Bisque will likely release The Grand Tour sometime in 2006. The Grand Tour is a multi-platform (OS X and Windows) application that offers an interactive and immersive three dimensional solar system simulation. I was an alpha tester, and I can tell you that you will want this software!
Stargazer’s Delight Planetarium program; runs natively under OS X and OS 8.1 and above.
Starry Night Pro Planetarium and telescope control. Very elaborate, a bit too much eye candy. Manageable.
Sun Spotter A tool for grabbing the latest white-light image of the Sun, taken from the SOHO web site. The image corresponds to the sort of view you would see using a telescope equipped with a standard solar filter. Some brief notes are included to explain what it is you're looking at. Intended for amateur astronomers and teachers/students interested in the Sun. Free.
Voyager Planetarium and telescope control.
Where is M13? Now free. Planetarium software and printed charts and books will tell you a great deal about deep-sky objects, but they don’t show you where an object is in the Milky Way relative to the Earth (or outside the Milky Way, as is the case with other galaxies.) That’s where Where is M13? comes in. It helps you visualize the 3-D locations in addition to the physical properties of common deep sky objects. A nice feature is that you can choose relative or absolute data about an object. Where is M13? formerly cost $19, but author Bill Tschumy has made it freeware. Where is M13? is available for Mac OS (Universal Binary,) Linux/Unix, and Windows.
XEphem UNIX planetarium and telescope control. Runs under Apple’s X11 environment. Free if you want to compile it yourself, available as a Mac OS X package installer for a modest fee. This is an extremely powerful application that is worth the time required to learn to use its various options and functions.
Please e-mail me if you would like to contribute to this list.
And a Piece of Necessary Hardware
If you are going to control a telescope with a Mac, you need a
Keyspan High-Speed USB Serial Adapter, model USA-19HS.
 
Mac Users Only: Why Not Windows?
The Man Eating Tiger Page
  Updated January 6, 2008
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