astro photography with a Mac computer

[Mark at Beaufort]

A friend has enquired whether he can do asto photography with a Mac computer. Is there a CCD camera that has drivers for a Mac? Is there software which can also be used?

Mark

[jgs001]

Mark, worst case, you can run the software under windows on the mac using something like VMware Fusion. It's what I'm doing.

[James]

I'm currently using a Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 with Nebulosity and/or iCCD on my MacBook. I autoguide using a Lodestar and PhD as well. Both Nebulosity and PhD are produced by Craig Stark who himself is a Mac user.

The next project is using a firewire DMK camera from Imaging Source and Astro IIDC...

There's plenty of options for your friend... and as John says he can, if he wishes, use an emulator like Parallels, VMware or load Windows directly onto his Mac ( :shock: shudder ) by using BootCamp. Ironically I believe many Mac's actually run Windows faster than other Windows PC's do but that's probably only noticable to those with benchmarking apps and a certain fussiness...

I'm not an expert processor by any means but many packages are available on the Mac too, ranging from Photoshop at the high end down to free apps such as GIMP, Keiths Image Stacker, AstroStack and so on.

Your friend will almost certainly need to get himself a USB to serial converter from the likes of Keyspan.

Hope that helps...

James

[Mark at Beaufort]

Thanks both I will pass on your recommendations.

Mark

[Jarndyce]

Useful tips, thankyou.

I'm also looking at imaging on a Mac.

Incidentally, I've seen Macbooks that use a facility to turn the display red - with all programs. I saw it being used in a photographic studio. Unfortunately, forgot to ask what it was. It was done with a keyboard shortcut and I think uses Leopard's colour utility profiles.

Anyone know how it's done? - very useful for night vision!

[Eddie]

Anyone know how it's done? - very useful for night vision!

This is a great little app for the Mac.... http://www.aquiladigital.us/darkadapted/

Apogee CCD's are supported under a Mac Also.

Eddie

[Jarndyce]

Cheers Eddie.

Nice app! Thanks for that.

Can you recommend any stacking or astronomy software for the Mac?

[Eddie]

Pixinsight is available for Mac, though you need to have 10.5

http://pixinsight.com/index.html

Not got into it myself (not got 10.5 yet!). There is a steep learning curve with it but it is worth mastering. I tend to stack all my images in MaximDL 5 on the Laptop PC and then bring it over to the Mac and butcher the images in photoshop!

Eddie