Astrophotography: software capture tools for Nikon users

As far as Mac OS goes. Very little Astro anything is available for Mac OS for a variety of reasons. If you want to use a Mac then you need Bootcamp / Parallels so you can use Windows. The world is then your oyster. I know its all money, but the cost of Bootcamp plus Windows, I would add a bit more and get a Windows laptop just for imaging which will be less than £300. It will be better.

I'd tend to agree with this... though I do use a Mac for some processing, depending on what I'm doing. Windows gives you far more options.

The main software I'd use on the Mac is Nebulosity... but this won't do you much good, Christina, as Nikon is not supported!

Basic stuff, like star trails images, can be done on Macs, using the excellent StarStaX.

But outside of that... there's not much available, sadly.

As Rupert says, you can dual boot on a Mac. I have used VMware to run Windows in a "window" from Mac OS, and it works really well. Another option is to place a Wine wrapper on a Windows application and run it within the Mac. I've had mixed results with this, but some software works well.

My own solution is exactly what Rupert has suggested... have a separate Windows laptop for astro image processing. Sorry!

Very little Astro anything is available for Mac OS for a variety of reasons

The irony is that almost every single one of our lecturers shows up with an Apple laptop.

Indeed it is odd. In my pre astro days I spent a lot of time 'fixing' computers. Everytime I had to do a Mac I was just frustrated by what I did not have access to or what failed to work as advertised.

The irony I encountered were that 70% of my clients who had iMacs ran Windows on them! I think that says more that there is a snobbery where people like to have an Apple logo as some kind of status symbol but not what goes with it.

Anyway, this is not the place for a Win vs Mac debate.....

Anyway, this is not the place for a Win vs Mac debate…..

No indeed, this not the place for a Win vs Mac debate, its a place for a Canon vs Nikon debate 😀

What would be useful for Nikon users is a list of Nikon models that have Nikon's firmware enabled bulb exposure beyond 30s when tethered to a pc.  And there was something else, was it the bug in RAW files on many models?  I dont know if such a list exist somewhere but it would be useful for our many many Nikon owning members.

I hate Windows. The interface gives me a headache. It's visually dire! Nothing to do with slapping an Apple logo on things or status symbols...

What we need are a few 'game changers' out there to write software that's mac compatible so that astrophotography can be accessible to anybody wishing to give it a go.

Anyway, as Tej said,

its a place for a Canon vs Nikon debate

..And Nikon wins 🙂

Hi Tej,

Which kind of functionality are you after with a Nikon? For timelapse photography you are just taking pictures in defined intervals - which I can either set up in the camera itself (shooting menue > Interval timer shootings on the D750), or I use an external remote. I am not sure whether Lightroom tethering works together with the interval timer, the alternative is a driver which mounts the camera as a drive to download the pictures.

Regards

Thomas