I recently purchased a new laptop after my old one died unexpectedly. I had to install a bunch of software that I use for astronomy and my main hobby of planetary astrophotography. I thought it would be a good idea to list it down, so here goes.
Stellarium – https://stellarium.org/ – Stellarium is a planetarium software that can be used to plan observations. I use the desktop version for windows but there is also a web version available.
SharpCap Pro – https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads – SharpCap Pro is my primary software for capturing data from my astronomy camera.
PIPP – https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/downloads – PIPP is a preprocessing software with a wide variety of functions like extracting R/G/B channels, binning, converting footage to AVI etc
SER Player – https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/ser-player#downloads – While capturing footage in raw format, it can be saved as an SER file – this is a useful too to review the ser footage.
Autostakkert – https://www.autostakkert.com/wp/download/ – Everyone’s favorite planetary stacking software.
AstroSurface – http://astrosurface.com/ – I have grown to like AstroSurface very much – it provides stacking and processing capability in a single program.
Registax – https://www.astronomie.be/registax/ – Registax while not popular anymore for stacking, is still widely used for image processing using wavelets and other tools.
Gimp – https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ – Free general purpose image processing. I use to for post processing of stacked and sharpened images.
Winjupos – http://jupos.privat.t-online.de/index.htm – I primarily use Winjupos for derotation and combining data from multiple footages in a session.
I will continue to update this list and provide more information to this post. I hope you found it useful, feel free to suggest any other tools.
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