Kitt Peak National Observatory
Visitor Center and Museum

Imaging Workshop

Essential Freeware for Webcam Astrophotography

Aberrator

http://aberrator.astronomy.net/
A freeware program that generates star testing images showing the effects of aberrations and distortions that affect the quality of a telescopic image.

AVI2BMP

http://www.daansystems.com/freestuff/
A Freeware program that allows the manual selection of the very best frames in a video sequence and writes them to a separate folder so they can be stacked by another program.

FITS Liberator

http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/
Photoshop plugin that allows working with .FITS format images with Photoshop.

IMerge

http://www.geocities.com/jgroveuk/iMerge.html
A “donationware” program that allows creating seamless mosaics from multiple images by “dragging and dropping” images into place.

Irfanview

http://www.irfanview.com
A popular freeware image-viewing program with image capture and basic image processing capabilities.

K3CCD Tools

http://www.pk3.org/Astro/index.htm?k3ccdtools.htm
A very popular free-to-try-register-to-use webcam control and video image-processing program that works with most webcams and webcam-style astrocameras.

Macintosh drivers for Philips cameras

http://www.ioxperts.com/

http://www.bensoftware.com/help/toucam.html
Macintosh users will find no support for their computers on the Philips installation disk. However, Apple drivers for Philips Vesta and ToUcam cameras can be found at IOXperts and Bensoftware.

Macintosh Webcam Video Capture and Processing Programs

http://www.unm.edu/~keithw/software/keithsAstroImager.html
http://www.unm.edu/~keithw/software/keithsImageStacker.html
These programs allow MacOS users to capture and process astronomical webcam videos

PixInsight

http://pleiades-astrophoto.com/
A popular powerful astronomical image-processing program that includes the SGBNR noise reduction program.

PoleFinder

http://www.polarfinder.co.uk/
A freeware program for determining the location of the true celestial pole using Polaris Circle equipped polar scopes.

QCFocus

http://www.astrosurf.org/astropc/qcam/programme.html
A freeware program that measures a star image full width half-maximum and provides graphical and numeric data about the star’s focus.

Registax

http://registax.astronomy.net/
A very popular freeware image stacking and processing program that allows stacking video frames and wavelet processing of the combined single image.

Virtual Dub

http://www.virtualdub.org/
A powerful freeware .AVI video repair, editing, and modification program.

Visual Spec

http://astrosurf.com/vdesnoux/
A freeware program for processing astronomical spectra.

Wcctrl

http://www.burri-web.org/bm98/
An independent camera settings control program that works in conjunction with K3CCD Tools. Allows camera adjustments without calling the default camera manufacturer’s program that will overlay the K3CCD Tools screen.

Windows Drivers for Philips cameras

http://www.driverscollection.com/?V=Philips&S=41
http://www.pc-cameras.philips.com/index_drivers.html