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.



A Sampling of Astronomy Software and Resources for Apple Macintosh Computers
One asterisk * means I have or had a license and I have tried the application.
Two asterisks ** means I have a current license and I use the
application. Three asterisks *** means that I am a frequent user.

Remember that the asterisks or lack thereof are not a quality rating;
they only indicate my level of experience with an app.

This is not a comprehensive list of Macintosh astronomy software. Send me updates
with your own brief writeup for inclusion on this page.

APOD Grabber * Retrieves (via the Internet) and displays the Astronomical Picture of the Day. No longer available on the original site, railheaddesign.com, so google it. It’s rather pointless anyway, I think, since you can see the APOD at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html.
Applelust Scitech Web site. Science—including astronomy—on the Mac.
Astro IIDC * FireWire Webcam Control. Used by Alan Friedman for images like the ones in his gallery. 'Nuf said.
AstroPlanner * Observation planning and telescope control. Highly recommended. Can communicate with Equinox.
Astrostack * Java-based image stacker-combiner.
BTVPro * Captures QuickTime video from FireWire or USB webcams. Requires drivers from iOXperts
Cartes Du Ciel/Skychart * Originally Windows-only and known as Cartes Du Ciel (Sky Charts), this venerable (and free) program has come to OS X. Don’t forget to download the databases under Current Catalogs.
ccdPlace For imaging with ALTA CCD cameras. The current version is used mainly by professionals, and it is free. Future versions will reportedly support CCD, CMOS, and DSLR cameras from a variety of vendors, and will not be free. There is no web site for this software at this time. E-mail Georg Tuparev at ccdplace-support@tuparev.com to get a copy.
Celestia * 3D Solar-System and space simulation. Free.
Clear-Sky Clock Widget ***

OS X Widget from the creator of Equinox. Free.

Clear Sky Clock for iPhone *** Read about it here, download it free from the iTunes App Store.
DarkAdapted X ** Now free. Turns your display red or green and dims it 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 *** From Darryl Robertson of Microprojects. Planetarium program with telescope, webcam, and focuser control. Webcam autoguiding is supported. Powerful features, but easy to use thanks to a well designed user interface. Darryl provides excellent support for Equinox and Equinox Image (immediately below).
Equinox Image *** Also from Darryl Robertson of . It used to be that Equinox (above) controlled both telescopes and SBIG CCD cameras. Darryl wisely split the tasks and ended up with better software. The Equinox Image web page says “Equinox Image controls Santa Barbara Instrument Group (SBIG) CCD cameras (grey scale and color) and Optec, RoboFocus and JMI focusers. This program also controls SBIG filter wheels, AO devices and remote guide heads. Auto focus, FWHM, Photometry, Astrometry, RMS error, color enhancement and format conversion functions are available. Tools exist to dark subtract, align and stack images, composite color, drift scan (TDI) and program up to ten image sequences.”
iAstroPhoto * Focusing assistance for Canon digital SLR’s. The author was inspired by DSLR Focus for Windows. The 20D is supported, but Canon cameras after the 20D are not supported. Author Steve Bryson is apparently too busy with his day job to continue development.
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 * Recently updated for Intel Macs and Leopard. Stacking and combining of still images or QuickTime videos. $15 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!
Mars24 * Java-based sunclock for Mars, showing graphical representations of the planet’s position relative to Earth. Also available: Titan24. Free from NASA.
MoonMenu *** August, 2008: Finally, an update! Displays information on current, past, and future lunar phases.
Nebulosity *** One of the best Mac image-capture and processing apps. Craig Stark, PhD, writes “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).”
Observing Logs Various observing logs in database format. Free.
PhD Guiding *** This is another great piece of software from Craig Stark, who says “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. That's it! ...In PHD Guiding, all calibration is taken care of automatically. You do not need to tell it anything about the orientation of your camera, nor do you need to tell it anything about the image scale. The automatic calibration routine takes care of this for you. Odds are you won't ever need to set a single parameter. Just select your star and hit "PHD Guide" and let the software take care of it. ” Guides through ShoeString Astronomy's GPUSB adapter.
Pixinsight ** Pixinsight is astro-image processing software that came to the Mac in December, 2008. It is world-class software—the most advanced astro-image processing application released for the Mac to date. The interface is not very Mac-like, and the learning curve is made a bit steeper by the lack of documentation, but Pixinsight touts their forums as the source for help. Dr. Craig Stark, himself an author of excellent Mac imaging software (see Nebulosity and PHD Guider) has put a couple of Pixinsight video tutorials at http://www.stark-labs.com/blog/files/PITutorials.php. Also see Craig's blog at http://www.stark-labs.com/blog/blog.php.
SAO Image DS9 Free from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard. “SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible.”
Scope Calculator * Calculates and compares field of view, magnification, and exit-pupil size for telescope eyepieces. Free.
Scope Driver

The developer says “ScopeDriver lets you connect your computer to your astronomical telescope. ... You can control your telescope from the comfort of indoors, or even across the Internet. You can also plan your observing in advance, on your computer, then instruct your telescope to take you on a tour of these objects, and log your observations from within the ScopeDriver package. ScopeDriver can also control a camera via a serial shutter control, completely automating observing patrols and sky surveys.

Seeker ** Software Bisque’s web site says “Seeker is a multi-platform (Macintosh OS X Universal and Windows XP/Vista) application that provides an immersive three dimensional simulation of our solar system. Experience simulated "space flight" and explore the Sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, interplanetary spacecraft and earth-orbiting satellites with stunning realism.” I have it, and I like it.
TheSkyX Student Edition from
Software Bisque
***
Planetarium program. Software Bisque has committed to bringing its software—TheSky, CCDSoft, and TPoint—to the Mac as Universal Binaries. TheSky X Student Edition was first. It lacks telescope control. Look for an update offering telescope control sometime in 2008. Eventually CCDSoft and TPoint will be released, not as separate applications as they are (in the Windows domain now), but as extra-cost modules in TheSkyX. TheSkyX is not a port of a Windows app. It represents the first fruit of a complete rewrite of all of Software Bisque’s software.
TheSkyX Widget ** A very nice planetarium widget based on TheSkyX. Free.
Stargazer’s Delight Planetarium program; runs natively under OS X and OS 8.1 and above.
Starlink *** I hesitated before listing Starlink here because it is part of the Fishcamp Engineering’s Starfish Guide Camera package. I bought a Starlfish in November, 2008, however, and I found the Starfish and Starlink combination provided excellent guiding. I have not had a lot of experience with Starlink due to inclement weather, but I expect to be a frequent user.
Starry Night Pro ** Planetarium and telescope control. Very elaborate very good, with a bit too much eye candy for my taste.
Stellarium * Free planetarium program, noted for its beauty. Not for heavy-duty observing, I think, but good for finding out what’s up.
Sun Spotter * August 2008: Sun Spotter has been upgraded recently. 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. Voyager was the first such program I used on a Mac long before OS X days. Carina Software took years to update Vopyager and did not communicate with their customers, so I moved on.
Where is M13? * 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 comment on, contribute to, or correct this list.
Software Not Featured Here

There is a great deal of UNIX software available from the major observatories and research institutions around
the world. Macs can run all of it because the Mac OS is UNIX. In some cases, like IRAF and XEphem,
there are Mac installers available that work from the standard Mac graphic user interface. In other cases it is
assumed that you know UNIX and your are expected to compile and install the software from the UNIX
command line. In the case of IRAF and some others you must be a programmer able to write little programs
called “scripts” in order to control the software. I have omitted most of that software from this page,
but a Google search something like this should show you a selection.

And a Piece of Necessary Hardware

If you are going to control a telescope with a computer, you need a Keyspan Serial-to-USB Adapter.
used with a Mac are the USA-19HS “USB High-Speed Serial Adapter;” the UPR-112G Mini Port
Replicator; and the USA-49WG “USB 4-Port Serial Adapter.” The latter is great if you have more
than one serial device, such as a mount and a focuser

 
If You are Running Windows on Your Mac Under Virtualization (Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion):
You should be aware that if you have both Mac and Windows drivers installed for a device such as a CCD camera or one of the Keyspan Serial Adapters mentioned above, the device will not function under Windows.

The reason is simple: the Mac driver loads when you boot your Mac and it is still running when you start Parallels or VMWare. The Mac driver will not yield to Windows, and the Windows version of the driver will be unable to load.

The solution is to keep the installer and uninstaller for the Mac driver(s) on your Mac. If you are going to operate the device under Windows, uninstall the Mac driver (and reboot if necessary). The device should now work under Windows virtualization (if it is supported). If you want to operate the device under the Mac OS, reinstall the Mac driver (and reboot if necessary).

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