Some of the best Mac Astronomy and Astrophotography software available today.

Planning & Observation:

• HNSKY (Hallo Northern Sky): 30,000 object database planetarium with INDI telescope control brought to you by the same developer of ASTAP.

• AstroPlanner: Astronomical planning and observation, visualization and logging with telescope control.

• Observatory: Astronomical Image management with file organization in smart albums, manual and automatic image tagging with plate solving, notes, and Mac Finder Fits, XISF file previews. Access to research images from professional archives.

• Cartes du Ciel: Sky charts with access to multiple astronomical catalogs.

• SkySafari 6 Pro: Highly visual planetarium program with telescope control, object information, and access to hundreds of Hubble telescope images.

• Our Galaxy: Our Galaxy from a different perspective, helps you visualize the spacial relationships between different objects within our galaxy.

• Uruk_One: An astronomical event analyzer aimed at experienced astronomers who study past, present and future astronomical events.

Planetarium & Scope Control:

• CloudMakers AstroTelescope: Simplistic native Mac application that controls your telescope to go to objects. Part of the CloudMakers suite of astrophotography applications.

• Stellarium: Highly visual planetarium program with more than 1 million objects that includes telescope control.

• KStars with EKOS: KStars planetarium program with accurate sky simulation and access to many object catalogs, offers planning, custom horizons, telescope control, and EKOS imaging suite.

• SkySafari 6 Pro: Highly visual planetarium program with telescope control, object information, and access to hundreds of Hubble telescope images.

• Starry Night: Deep sky database of 38,000 objects, highly visual, and includes telescope control with an interactive sky guide.

• TheSkyX: An essential tool for observatory control, deep space imaging and scientific discovery. 

• AstroGrav: A full-featured, high precision solar system simulator that calculates the gravitational interactions between all astronomical bodies, so that the motions of asteroids and comets are simulated much more accurately than with planetarium applications.

Capturing & Processing:

• Tycho: Can detect near-earth objects and main belt asteroids.

• INDIGO A1 (all-in-one): M1 native astrophotography suite of imaging, guiding, telescope control, scripting and more.

• AstroDMx Capture: Cross-platform, fully featured astronomical image capture application for deep sky and solar imaging.

• Affinity Photo: Full fledged photo editing software with workflow features specific to astrophotography stacking and calibration utilizing full GPU acceleration.

• ASTAP: A free stacking and astrometric solver (plate solver) program for deep sky images.

• Astro Pixel Processor: Advanced image processing software for Deepsky and Widefield Astrophotography.

• Open Nebulosity (formerly Stark Labs Nebulosity): Designed to be a powerful, but simple to use capture and processing application.

• PixInsight: Advanced Image Processing. PixInsight is a modular, open- architecture, portable image processing platform.

• CloudMakers AstroImager: A powerful, but easy to use image capture application for the astrophotography. 

• CloudMakers AstroDSLR: A digital camera tethering and remote capture application specialized for astrophotography.

• CloudMakers AstroGuider: A simple to use guiding application for your telescope mount. Works with the rest of the CloudMakers suite.

• DeepSNR: A deep learning based software that removes noise from astro images.

• GraXpert: A fast and easy way to remove gradients for processing.

• PHD2 Guiding: Free community driven and developed guiding software.

• Open Astro Project: Free planetary imaging application.

• oaLive: The Open Astro Project live stacking program for EAA observations.

• Lynkeos: Free planetary stacking and processing application.

• Keith's Image Stacker: Planetary and astronomical image processing. Not in development any more.

• StarTools: Advanced image processing software for astrophotography.

• FireCapture: Advanced planetary image capturing software.

• SiriL: Free, highly automated image processing software for both planetary and deep sky images.

• Planetary Imager: Free image capture software for planetary imaging. (Website link temporarily broken, but if you can compile software from GitHub, here’s that link.)

• PlanetarySystemStacker: Probably the best stacking program for planetary/lunar/solar images and videos. It’s not easy to install until now since it’s a Python based Mac application. Nick Kohrn, Mac developer has written an installer launcher application here to simplify running the app. Just download and drop into your app folder, and it does the rest.

• KStars with EKOS: The free EKOS fully automated astrophotography suite with automatic focus, camera and filter control, target acquisition, scheduling, mosaics, plate solving, and guiding includes KStars planetarium program for planning and night sky simulation.

• CCDciel: Free deep sky imaging platform that features automated control of camera, focuser, focus wheels, rotators and more with accurate plate solving.

• Seti Astro’s Editing Suite: A popular stand alone (or PixInsight scripts) editing suite that incorporates some of the following scripts; Statistical Stretch, Star Stretch, NBtoRGB Stars, Halo-B-Gon, and Continuum Subtract Utility as a standalone application.

• StarStaX: A simple but fast imaging stacking software with different blending modes.

• Startrails Creator: An an easy-to-use application to create star trail photos.

• AstroImageJ: Enhanced image processing especially for photometry.

• Starry Sky Stacker: A basic image stacking program. When you want simple and straight forward, this is it.

Utilities:

• CloudMakers FITS Preview: A native Mac FITS file viewer.

• CloudMakers INDIGO Control Panel: Can be used to connect to a remote INDI or INDIGO server to read device and driver properties.

• CloudMakers INDIGO Server: Server for the INDIGO driver platform that allows for remote astrophotography operations over a network.

• CloudMakers Astrometry: Native Mac Astrometry image plate solving system.

• CloudMakers INDIGO Dashboard: A versatile tool that allows for custom created control panels to view and control all remote imaging operations using the INDIGO platform.

• INDIGO to Go: Mac OS and iOA monitor for all INDIGO based applications from CloudMakers..

• Collimation Aid: A collimation overlay to aid in collimation of a telescope. Recently updated to 64-bit, should run everywhere now.

• SER Player: SER video playback.

• Nightlight: A modern interface for viewing fits files and their properties.

• QuickFits: Add finder QuickLook features for viewing Fits files. Shows the time, exposure length, temperature, and gain of the camera.

• QFitsView: A free, very simple FITS viewing program.

• PHD2 Log Viewer: Can open and view PHD2 log files.

• Night Vision: Designed to preserve your vision during the night by turning the screen red on your laptop monitor.

Hardware specific Mac software applications:

• Open PECTool: Celestron mount PEC recording tool

• ASI Studio: ZWO imaging suite, live stacking, planetary capture, and DSO capture

• QSEye: Quantum Scientific Imaging software

• PoleMaster: QHY Polemaster software

• iOptron iPolar: iOptron’s polar alignment camera software

• MountWizard4: for 10Micron mounts (mount model creation)

An in depth look at Mac astronomy & astrophotography applications.