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.

Mac Photo Software Reviews
Free Photo Stacking Software For Mac Download

Jun 29, 2016 I went this way because I have some old Windows only software like Photoshop and dreamweaver, plus of course my astronomy software Backyard EOS, EQMOD, PHD2 etc. I understand there are some commercial packages for processing astro images that include stacking and work on a Mac.
CombineZP should run fine on an Intel Mac (after you get rid of OS/X and install Windows). Edit: Since a lot of people seem to have missed the point and think this isn't helpful, let me try to put things more directly. I am reasonably certain there is not currently any free (in either sense) software for stacking that runs directly on MacOS and is anywhere close to as good as CombineZP.

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.

Mar 19, 2016 AutoStakkert! (AS!3, AS!2) is lucky imaging software used to automatically analyze, align, and stack images of the Sun, Moon and Planets that were taken through a telescope. Using a fast video camera, noisy and slightly distorted images are obtained, that can be combined into a single high quality image using this software. Is free software, easy to use, very fast, and generally. 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. Apr 16, 2020 How to Edit Photos Best Photo Editing Software for Windows Lightroom vs ON1 Photo Raw vs Affinity Photo Best Tablets for Photo Editing Zerene Stacker – Simple to Use with Great Results This program is a great alternative to Photoshop and one of the best focus stacking software.

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 :-)

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.

Mac app disk space usage for system restore. 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)

Calendar maker software mac os x. Processing video data:

AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)

Obtaining data from DSLR:

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.

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.

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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

Free Photo Stacking Software For Mac Download

Introduction

Sequator is a free software which can track stars on multiple images, align stars and stack them.

If you don't have an equatorial mount, by stacking non-blur star images in short-time exposures, the result will be almost similar to long-exposure on an equatorial mount. However, Sequator can control the exposure properly by auto-brightness or HDR-mode output, in 16-bit TIFF for further post processing. Additionally average random noises, rather than over-exposed on a physical equatorial mount.

Easy; user friendly
Fast
Automatic determination for best parameters
Capable under heavy light pollution
Powerful correction for wide-angle & complex distortions
Intelligent sky mask
Foreground detection & stacking
Star light enhancement function
Light pollution reduction function
Support star trails mode
Batch processing for time-lapse
Support RAW & 16-bit TIFF

Sequator will not provide too many confusing options; in contrast, strictly select the most effective features for you. Endeavor to automatically determine best parameters, save the time from boring trials.'Simple but powerful', is the core philosophy of Sequator.