Hi, I have been using Maxim DL to calibrate and stack my images, however I have now changed over to a Mac. What is a good Mac compatible program that will stack and calibrate without introducing any unwanted modifications. I have Pix insight and Atro Pixel Processor. Are they any good. APP normalises images before stacking. Is this a problem? I can probably skip this step if it is.
I use a local installation of astrometry.net for plate solving (putting a WCS on the image), which is what I understand you to mean by “calibration”. Please elaborate if I misunderstand you. GitHub - indigo-astronomy/astrometry: Astrometry.net for OSX is just one place to get more information. A search engine will find others.
For stacking I use SWarp. See Install swarp on macOS with MacPorts for how to install it.
Both packages are of very high quality and although originally written for Unix-like systems have been ported to other operating systems.
Have fun!
Paul
Thanks Paul. No by Calibration I mean applying Darks. Flats and Bias
Ah. For virtually all my work the images are taken on a Windows TCS running Maxim DL, which does the calibration for me. So I can’t help much there, sorry.
For plate solving and stacking SWarp and astronomy.net are still strongly recommended. In particular, SWarp appears to do a much better job of stacking subs than Maxim DL
Way back in the distant past I used IRAF for applying darks, flats and biases. IRAF is emphatically not recommended. It has all the user friendliness of a starving rat.
Good luck with your search. If anything comes to my attention I will let you know.
Paul
If you’re not adverse to buying more software, I can highly recommend “Tycho Tracker”.
It is an all in one solution for calibrating and doing photometry on your images. Runs on Mac and Windows. If you are interested in making asteroid and comet observations, it is equally good at that. Not too expensive.
Bill
It may be worth your time to look at AstroImageJ as it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. I started using AstroImageJ instead of MaximDL a little over a year ago. It has a bit of a learning curve, however it is able to do much more than MaximDL as far as image processing and analysis goes. It will calibrate images and plate solve. The workflow is more involved than MaximDL. I switched to AstroImageJ primarily to get flux readings in reports; not just software calculated magnitudes. The one thing I have not figured out is how to get it to label stars with the AUID instead of T1, C2, C3, etc. in the report. If you do give it a try, you will need to keep track of which stars have which designations.