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.
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 :-)
Don't know if you have installed Registax on a new computer 3 years since you published this article. I have a Windows 7 and a Windows 10 machine and Registax would hang at the Align step on both. I tried reducing the number of align points and reducing the number of images to no avail. My machines' specs are pretty powerful, core i7, 16GB RAM. RegiStax 5 V5.1 update (28 april 2010) Release 5.1.9.2 (1847 Kb) V5.1 update (7 april 2010, updated 10 april 2010) Release 5.1.9.1 (1846 Kb). Previous V5 release (22 dec 2009) Release 5.1.0.2 (2030Kb). Initial V5 release (21 mar 2009) Final- release 5.0.2.8 (1863Kb) Manual (21 feb 2009) Manual RegiStax 4. Download the latest version of RegiStax V3 for Windows. Optimize the astronomical images you have. RegiStax V3 is professional software for image processing.
Software
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)
Processing video data:
Split a PDF file at given page numbers, at given bookmarks level or in files of a given size. Extract from PDF. Extract pages from PDF files. Rotate PDF files, every page or just the selected pages. Merge PDF files together taking pages alternatively from one and the other. The perfect tool if you have a single-sided scanner. PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive. PDF Split and Merge Basic is an open source tool (GPL license) designed to handle.pdf files. It requiers a Java Virtual Machine 1.4.2 or higher and it?s released in 2 versions, basic and enhanced. A simple tool designed to split and merge pdf files. Pdfsam vs pdfmod vs pdf shuffler. Discontinued extract-images-from-pdf gplv2 poppler. PdfMod (sometimes referred to as PDF Mod) was added by gyorgyjano in Jan 2010 and the latest update was made in Oct 2018. The list of alternatives was updated Nov 2020. It's possible to update the information on PdfMod or report it as discontinued, duplicated or spam. PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.
- AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)
Obtaining data from DSLR: Ryuichi sakamoto b2 unit download.
- 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.
Registax For Mac Download Softonic
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.
The current matrix I use is listed below. If you find a better one, please let me know.
Processing video data:
Split a PDF file at given page numbers, at given bookmarks level or in files of a given size. Extract from PDF. Extract pages from PDF files. Rotate PDF files, every page or just the selected pages. Merge PDF files together taking pages alternatively from one and the other. The perfect tool if you have a single-sided scanner. PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive. PDF Split and Merge Basic is an open source tool (GPL license) designed to handle.pdf files. It requiers a Java Virtual Machine 1.4.2 or higher and it?s released in 2 versions, basic and enhanced. A simple tool designed to split and merge pdf files. Pdfsam vs pdfmod vs pdf shuffler. Discontinued extract-images-from-pdf gplv2 poppler. PdfMod (sometimes referred to as PDF Mod) was added by gyorgyjano in Jan 2010 and the latest update was made in Oct 2018. The list of alternatives was updated Nov 2020. It's possible to update the information on PdfMod or report it as discontinued, duplicated or spam. PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.
- AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)
Obtaining data from DSLR: Ryuichi sakamoto b2 unit download.
- 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.
Registax For Mac Download Softonic
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.
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 |
31JAN2018
Super Blue Blood Moon happened and everyone came to get these files and Dropbox has temporarily suspended my links. Oh no!
The instructions below for creating your own wineskin packages will still work. In the meantime I'll work on getting my prebuilt wineskin package links back up.
06OCT2015
Wizardry 7 pc. Updated files! These are working in OSX 10.11 El Capitan. Read Previous posts.
Download Registax 6.1.0.8 for OSX 10.11 El Capitan
Download AutoStakkert 2.3.0.21 for OSX 10.11 El Capitan
04JAN2015
Many pieces of software used for astronomy do not have equivalents that can be used by those of us running OSX on macintosh computers. I have made a few wineskin wrapped versions of the software that I am currently using and I have made them available here for you.
You must first download Wineskin Winery and install it.
You can then wrap Software such as Registax and AutoStakkert so that they will run almost seamlessly in OSX. If you want to skip this step, you still need to install wineskin winery, but you can use the wineskin wrapped versions of Registax and AutoStakkert that I've prepared below. They are currently running without issue on OSX 10.10.
Download Registax 6.1.0.8 packaged in Wine for OSX.
Download AutoStakkert 2.3.0.21 packaged in Wine for OSX. This wrapper has the windows ffmpeg executables already installed that will allow you to import .mov files without having to transcode them.
Registax For Mac Download Mac
Enjoy!
