The Growing List of Mac Planetary Imaging and Processing Applications

Saturn captured on the Celestron EdgeHD 11” with ASICap and a ZWO ASI224MC camera.

Saturn captured on the Celestron EdgeHD 11” with ASICap and a ZWO ASI224MC camera.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is a growing list of Mac planetary imaging and processing applications. There’s finally a very close equivalent to AutoStakkert on the Mac now too with Planetary System Stacker.

From the imaging standpoint we have the following:

  • oaCapture - always iterating and improving. But been around for some time.

  • Planetary Imager - very straight forward planet imager.

  • AstroImager - which within the last year added SER video recording for planetary imaging

  • FireCapture - one of the most popular planetary imagers

  • ZWO ASICap (part of ASIStudio and only for ZWO cameras)

From the stacking and processing standpoint we now have the following:

  • Siril - which has slowly been improving it’s planetary processing options

  • Planetary System Stacker - a new project that now has a stable Mac release. This does not currently have a standalone Mac installer, and is a project on Github with documentation covering how to install and use the program on the Mac. This is currently the most capable planet processing software on the Mac, and is getting extremely close to reproducing images on par with AutoStakkert on the PC. Installation requires you install Python 3, and execute some simple terminal commands to get it up and running. Instructions are here in the user guide.

  • PixInsight - is known for DSO image processing, but has some capable tools for processing planets, seek out tutorials for how to do this if you already own the software. Otherwise look to one of the other options.

  • Linkeos - this software has been around for some time, but does not offer point alignment of parts of the planet to overcome seeing effects, it only does global alignment. So while it can stack and process an image, it will not get you fantastic results.

Seven single images processed separately, then combined in Photoshop to make an animated GIF. This was shot on my EdgeHD 11” telescope with ASICap and the ZWO ASI224MC camera.

Seven single images processed separately, then combined in Photoshop to make an animated GIF. This was shot on my EdgeHD 11” telescope with ASICap and the ZWO ASI224MC camera.