Pentax Kx Software For Mac
It's been a good three years now since I swapped my HP laptop for a Macbook Pro. In the mean time, I've started doing a bit more astrophotography and of course the change of operating system has affected the tools I use to obtain and process photos.
Amateur astronomers have traditionally mostly used Windows, so there are a lot of Windows tools, both freeware and payware, to help. I used to run the freeware ones in Wine on Ubuntu with varying levels of success.
Pentax User - contains the latest Pentax news, reviews, galleries, forums and exclusive Pentax competitions - Join Pentax User Plus for exclusive deals on Pentax repairs, insurance and more. Card readers can be quicker, card readers often come with freebie recovery software, card readers wont send a virus up the USB cable into your camera. Pentax Kx is Pentax digital SLR for beginner and enthusiast. Pentax Kx replaces Pentax KM / K2000. There are many improvements from KM, such as three stops higher ISO setting, video recording, faster continuous shooting, 11 selectable auto focus points and 12.3 megapixel image resolution (compare to.
When I first got the Mac, I had a lot of trouble getting Wine to run reliably and eventually ended up doing my alignment and processing manually in The Gimp. However, that's time consuming and rather fiddly and limited to stacking static exposures.
However, I've recently started finding quite a bit of Mac OS based astrophotography software. I don't know if that means it's all fairly new or whether my Google skills failed me over the past years :-)
Software
I thought I'd document what I use, in the hope that I can save others who want to use their Macs some searching.
Some are Windows software, but run OK on Mac OS X. You can turn them into normal double click applications using a utility called WineSkin Winery.
Obtaining data from video camera:
- oaCapture (MacOS X, free)
- AstroImager (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Format-converting video data:
- Handbrake (Mac OS X, free, open source)
Processing video data:
Moved Location of data (PCDJ-DEX3) folder to prevent various access/saving issues. OpenGL to Metal (macOS Catalina Graphics API). Using new modern way to access Music (iTunes) library. Dj software for macbook pro.
- AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)
Obtaining data from DSLR:
- AstroDSLR (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Processing and stacking DSLR files and post-processing video stacks:
- RegiStax (Windows + Wine, free)
- Nebulosity (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
Post-processing:
- The Gimp (Max OS X, free, open source)
Canon 6d app for mac. Telescope guiding:
- AstroGuider (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
- PHD2 (Mac OS X, free, open source)
Hardware
A few weeks ago I bought a ZWO ASI120MC-S astro camera, as that was on sale and listed by Nebulosity as supported by OSX. Until then I'd messed around with a hacked up Logitech webcam, which seemed to only be supported by the Photo Booth app.
I've not done any guiding yet (I need a way to mount the guide scope on the main scope - d'oh) but the camera works well with Nebulosity 4 and oaCapture. I'm looking forward to being able to grab Jupiter with it in a month or so and Saturn and Mars later this year.
The image to the right is a stack of 24x5 second unguided exposures of the trapezium in M42. Not too bad for a quick test on a half-moon night.
Settings
I've been fiddling with Nebulosity abit, to try and get it to stack the RAW images from my Nikon D750 as colour. I found a conversion matrix that was supposed to be decent, but as it turns out that made all images far too blue.
The current matrix I use is listed below. If you find a better one, please let me know.
| R | G | B | |
|---|---|---|---|
| R | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 |
| G | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.00 |
| B | 1.00 | 0.00 | 0.50 |
| Back ToNews |
posted Friday, February 17, 2012 at 11:58 PM EDT
PK_Tether--the unofficial tethering solution for Pentax SLRs--has just been updated to a new version, we hear today.
Created by Polish programmer Tomasz Kos, and originally known as 'Pentax Kx Periodic Shooting', PK_Tether has been on the scene for a little over a year now.
As its earlier name suggests, PK_Tether was first created specifically with the Pentax K-x in mind. It's grown a lot since then, though, and now provides support for many Pentax K-series DSLRs. (Only the *ist series, K100D, K100D Super, K110D, K-m / K2000 and 645D aren't supported by the program.) While it doesn't provide live view capability, since Pentax's own, now-discontinued tethering solution never offered this, it does allow for remote shooting including direct access to a broad selection of exposure controls.
The new release is PK_Tether v0.6.4, which makes a number of changes. The shutter release functionality has been redesigned to avoid bugs with interval shooting in Bulb mode, and the program will no longer allow more than seven frames to be buffered at any given time. There's also a new function to group shots in folders by capture date, and the debug options have been moved into the menu system, rather than having dedicated buttons in the PK_Tether interface.
More details and the download can be found on the PK_Tether website!
| Back ToNews |