Latest capture and processing software

[johnnyt123]

Hi everyone.

I have been off the scene for a while and would now like to get back ibonit.
I just want to check what the latest and best astrophotography capture software that is out there at the moment.

The last thing I used was maxim dL 5.
And have always processed in registers, deep sky stacker, autostakkert, and photoshop cs6.

Are these still current and sufficient and efficient or are there more efficient and user friendly software out there now?

Also can someone guide me to a god tutorial regarding how to plate solve?

Much appreciated.

Johnny

[RussellH]

Hi Johnny,

Sorry I don’t have a good answer for you, but was just thinking yesterday that I might make a list of everything that’s out there. As someone new trying to get into guided astrophotography, it’s been overwhelming trying to look at all the different options of how to configure everything on the software side, and I’m a computer programmer, so I should be able to figure it out! Trouble is it’s going to be a big job to find eveything out there, and I don’t know if I can get it all correct without experience or hands-on, but I may give it a go, just might take a few weeks/months.

Regarding plate solving, I have started looking into it. Seems several of the software packages these days have support built in, so it’s not too difficult, especially if you have a live internet feed so you don’t have to worry about configuring index files. So the tutorials are really the program documentation.

Russell.

[RugbyRene]

There's a lot of options out there. some good, some not so good.

I recently came upon KStars. It combines a planetarium and astrophotography in the one package. Best of all it's free. You can find info on it here:
https://edu.kde.org/kstars/

There's a very active forum here;
https://indilib.org/forum/index.html

The features it contains are far too numerous to list here but it's basically a swiss army knife. It dies it all. The lead developer Jasem Mutlaq is very helpful & will get back to you very promptly & the community is very helpful.

The only caveat is that because it's so feature rich, there is a steep learning curve but once you get it all set-up it's definitely worth it.

Clear skies

Rene

[sil]

AstroPixelProcessor is powerful and very idiot proof. Has numbered steps to guide you through, use defaults or learn to tweak, depending on what you feel. Its default result are close to the best I can do with PixInsight. Doesn't capture or plate solve, just take a ton of lights, dark, flats, bias frames and gives you a great image at the end.

Planetary: firecapture and AutoStakkert.

that covers most needs.