EP17 - Sunday, 30th August 2020 7:30pm BST - An overview of N.I.N.A. - Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy by Stefan Berg

[Grant]

This week we are joined by Stefan Berg the creator and maintainer of N.I.N.A - Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy - a free, open source, astrophotography imaging suite that's been getting a lot of attention and interest recently.

It is a software designed for all deep sky object imagers. Whether you're new to the world of DSO imaging or an experienced veteran, this project's goal is to make your image capture easier, faster, and more convenient.

You can find our more information and download N.I.N.A from here: https://nighttime-imaging.eu/

Stefan will be giving us an introduction and overview of the software 🙂

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP17 - Sunday, 30th August 2020 7:30pm BST - An overview of N.I.N.A. - Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy by Stefan Berg
Time: Aug 30, 2020 07:30 PM London

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https://zoom.us/j/94026841093?pwd=allHblhuY25DUU1sWVBobm1yNUZEZz09

Meeting ID: 940 2684 1093
Passcode: 979003

[Grant]

This starts in just under an hour 🙂

[Tenor Viol]

An interesting talk and obviously a capable piece of software, which has had a lot of thought go into it. 

I'm an IT guy and a 'serious' amateur photographer. In the world of media, but also professional scientists, Macs are the computers that everyone uses. You will find very few professional photographers running anything other than a Mac. It has perplexed me since I recently came into the world of (digital) AP that the majority of software that supports AP is written for PC only. Some of the key software components are only available for PC, few are available for multiple platforms. Given that much of this is open source, this is to some extent understandable as they lack the resources for multi-platform development. Whilst Macs are not perfect, they are significantly more stable than PCs and in particular W10 - I moved to Mac because I got fed-up of the endless crashes of W10 and every other day it seemed a massive download to update it to fix the bug of the previous update...

There are Mac options out there, but they're fewer in number, so less choice, and some like Siril are very unintuitive in how they work (I design IT systems and if we released such an unhelpful user interface we wouldn't last long). I realise much of this stems from the open source nature of development.

I'm guessing the PC bias in products is due to perceived number of end users. 

Sadly, despite NINA looking to be a well designed and thought out product, it seems unless someone writes them a large cheque there won't be a Mac version available any time soon. 

When my kit arrives it looks like I will be using KSTARS and EKOS. 

[TensorCat]

I believe NINA will run on a very very low end pc, then you just remote desktop into it.  

[Tenor Viol]

I'm sure it will, I just don't want to go anywhere near Windows if I can avoid it...

[JamesF]

Writing cross-platform software is tough.  Even if we just consider Windows, MacOS and Linux there's a huge amount of work involved.  Just handling MacOS and Linux is a handful for me and they're actually quite similar environments under the hood.  If you're starting on Windows then it tends to draw you away from writing code that is easily portable to other environments unless you specifically start out with that aim in mind and hold to it.

In the case of NINA, it appears to be written in C# which is very Windows-centric, so I doubt there's much chance of it being multi-platform any time soon.

As to why most AP software is Windows-based, I'd guess that's because of how people get into it.  If you're a photographer then you set out knowing that MacOS is probably where you're heading because that's the environment that has most of the tools you'll want, whereas people who start out in astronomy and then get into AP would prefer to use what they have and what they're familiar with, and like it or not, in the main what they have is a Windows machine.

James

[bottletopburly]

11 hours ago, Tenor Viol said:

When my kit arrives it looks like I will be using KSTARS and EKOS. 

 Maybe this link will be of help Tenor http://www.cloudmakers.eu/

[Tenor Viol]

12 minutes ago, bottletopburly said:

 Maybe this link will be of help Tenor http://www.cloudmakers.eu/

Thank you - I've been looking at that. I'm probably going the Astroberry route. 

[fwm891]

Was this one recorded ?

[Davey-T]

On 03/09/2020 at 19:57, fwm891 said:

Was this one recorded ?

What he said

Dave

[Bill S]

Yes it was.

Cheers