Software Used

Overview

The applications used for astrophotography at HawkASTRO are a mixture of free third-party applications and personally coded utility programs (written under the Visual Studio Community 2022 - free - IDE in C#).

The use of free third-party software is based on the personal principle to limit expenditure to a level consistent with the investment in hardware. The opinion is held that cost of paid top-level astrophotography processing software - and its extensions - is too high ($800 Australian dollars) to accompany the Seestar S50 hardware ($750 (Australian dollars).

Third-Party Software

SIRIL - astrophotography software tool designed for pre-processing and post-processing astronomical images.
Starnet++ - a software tool widely used in astrophotography to remove stars from astronomical images (and add them back in).
GraXpert - a software tool designed to help astrophotographers remove gradients and unwanted background artifacts from astronomical images as well as enhancing sharpness and suppressing noise.

Custom Utilities

As a hobby-level programmer (with coding skills incidentally acquired during a 40 year career as an electronic/electrical engineer) I enjoy coding small GUI applications. A number of small utilities have been coded for astrophotography. Apart from the inherent enjoyment of the coding exercise, most have been found to be actually useful.

NOTE: In the unlikely event of interest...

Due to writing to computer drives - for security reasons - none of the following utilities are publicly available.

GraXpert Interface

Currently (January 2025) GraXpert has a pre-release candidate which includes AI-driven background extraction, object and star deconvolution and denoising. This pre-release candidate (3.1.0rc2) needs the deconvolution results to be saved and reloaded to carry results forward in the GraXpert workflow. In addition the supplied GraXpert GUI was prone to crashing on my Windows 10 system. To arrive at a workaround, a Windows GUI C# was coded - GraXpert Interface.

Seestar Data Manager

Keeping track of the many files associated with observing with a Seestar smart telescope is difficult to manage in a consistent manner. This simple application provides that consistency.

Each mode - when selected - spawns a separate window to provide the functionality. The 'Download MyWorks' window is shown below as an example.

Sky View

The HawkASTRO observatory is located on a domestic block which is almost covered in trees. Consequently there is a limited view of the sky. A number of alternative sites on the block are needed to access a reasonable coverage of the sky for performing observation runs. To plan observations, working out which objects will appear in the various 'sky views' is an onerous task. The solution coded is SkyView - where the sky views are mapped onto an altitude/azimuth map (along with a RA/DEC grid) and the predicted position of various objects as well as the track through the views are plotted.

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