Usage / Comment

Used for location of objects and aiming my telescope. I started with Stellarium as a planetarium software and never changed to another one. It integrates well with Astrophotography Tool (see below) and provides all the functions I need. Usability is a bit tricky but I am getting better at it.

I am only using PHD2 for image guiding - never tried any other application. Tracking with PHD2 with my equipment is quite successful, my RMS on DEC and RA is typically below 1" but it did take some time to find the best settings.

This is my command center when taking images. It seamlessly integrates planetarium software, plate solvers, guiding software, EQMOD/ASCOM and many other applications. It takes care of my imaging plans, camera control, autofocus, scope control, meridian flips, temperature compensation, plate solving etc. etc.

Such a great tool at almost no cost. This tool was one of the main reasons I switched to an astro camera.

ASTAP is a great tool - very 'scientific' based, but the interface looks scary. It combines many different tasks and Han Kleijn is a great developer. I am also using his Sky Simulator for planning purposes when the sky is cloudy.

I installed ASTAP for image stacking a while ago, as a replacement for DeepSkyStacker, but then switched to SiriL for this task. For image capturing, I registered ASTAP in the Astrophotography Tool for plate solving, as it does a great job and is superfast.

SiriL is a free tool with an enormous set of functions. It provides image stacking, plate solving, histogram transformations, image math, wavelets etc. and supports scripting. Major drawbacks for me: you can only work on one image at a time, and the histogram tool has an awful interface.

SiriL was the tool of choice for a full processing chain before I started with PixInsight.

Nowadays, I am using SiriL mainly for stacking of narrowband images, as it provides a great script for separate Ha/OIII stacking from OSC images, and it is superfast with low memory consumption on my hard disk.

It also does a great job if you want to have a quick look at the results and do some preliminary image processing at 2 am when you end your imaging session.

I started my post processing of astro-images with Photoshop as I was a Photoshop user years ago and planned to purchase a license, anyway.

You can do a lot with it, and the various astro-plug-ins (see below) also do a great job. Dave Eagle's book (see also below in the literature section) provides an overview on the most important techniques.

I moved away from Photoshop as there is no 'scientific' background in the process and often, results were not reproducible or transferable to other images.

"Fear the PixInsight" - Well, if you ever downloaded a PixInsight trial version while at the same time doing post-processing with Photoshop you might ask "Why are people spending money on that?" It took me even two trial versions before I finally decided purchasing a PixInsight license.

Money should NOT be problem when trying to make this decision. People spend thousands of Euros in their equipments - but good data also requires good software for processing.

I finally decided moving to PixInsight because the processes and scripts are numerous, and they are designed for astrophotography. The whole design of the software allows a scientific approach by processes with numeric inputs and a high reproducibility.

The only drawback: The implementation of the stacking process is so slow compared to SiriL that I never use PixInsight for this step.

DeepSkyStacker was my first stacking program. I liked it because it is easy to use, very fast, and focuses on the one task - stacking.

However, when I started narrowband imaging, I realized that DeepSkyStacker is not longer my tool of choice. With my growing demands on quality, tool integration etc. I finally switched to SiriL and PixInsight.

I used ImageMagick for the first mathematical operations on Ha and OIII images. You need to get used to the command line interface, but then it does a great job. With PixelMath in PixInsight and the integration of mathematical operations in SiriL, ImageMagick made its way to my hall of fame of abandoned tools.

This was my beginner's book for astrophotography. I head no idea about stacking, imaging techniques, challenges etc.

Buy and read this book before you plan to start with this hobby.

Are you using PixInsight or Photoshop for processing your images? Do you need more basics on telescopes, cameras, stacking, post processing? This book provides a good overview on more than 200 DIN-A4 pages with more than 300 illustrations.

A small book with some good basics on how to process your images in Photoshop. This book gave me a good start in post processing with Photoshop - but I have moved to PixInsight now and only using Photoshop for minor finel finishing if PixSinsight does not provide the best process or script.

A great book with more than 400 pages on processes and scripts in PixInsight. It is focussing on PixInsight, only. Nothing about equipment or other software tools. A perfect supplement to Bracken's book with more details and examples. The only drawback is the sometimes confusing formatting of the headings.