The Sorcerer's Apprentice
A couple of years ago, I found myself highly dissatisified with the current state of "Lucky Imaging". This is the process of taking high speed images of the Sun, Moon, and Planets, and processing them for high resolution still images. In particular, there was nothing avaiable for the Mac or Linux, which I find myself using far more than Windows. I thought, "I can do better myself".
Well, I'm a busy guy, although I have the perhaps unrealistic idea that this may one day reach what I imagine for it, and it might even pay a few bills, right now there are so many bill paying options that are paying bills due, well, now as opposed to someday. I do still work on this regularly, but progress is very slow.
Never-the-less, it IS useful already. It's certainly not yet to a point we call MVP (Minimum Viable Product), so I'm going to make it an open beta so it can at least find a use in the world. I'm still finessing the high speed camera interface, so there's only one camera currently supported - Player One. Why? They have a great SDK, and their engineers don't make me feel like I'm arguing with a software development intern. They have been quick to respond to SDK bug reports, they are competent, cross platform savvy, and their hardware is at a qualiy that is "good enough for me"... and I can be damn picky. When I'm happy with my camera interface, I'll start adding other cameras, but that may be a while, there are only 37 hours in a day after all...<vbg>
So, here it is. It's not free, it's "open beta". If you find it useful, please enjoy, and let me know if anything goes wrong, or what features you'd like to see added sooner rather than later. I thought about adding an expiration to the beta to get people to upgrade periodically, but realised someone somewhere will be setup to image one night and only then discover that the working beta suddenly expired yesterday. I'm not doing that to anyone. If the beta meets your needs, use it forever, be my guest. If you subscribe to my blog over on accidentalastro.com, you'll get updates when new versions are avaialble. Eventually, I'd like to start selling this. I don't know what you do for a living, but I doubt you do it for free, or that anyone provides you with free reliable cars, housing, food, etc. Alas, I do not live in the Star Trek world ;-)
You can get The Sorcerer's Apprentice for macOS (version 11.0 or greater, Intel or Apple Silicon) here: download link or link to app store... oh wait, not yet. Crazy how many hoops there are for that. Email me at rwright@starstonesoftware.com, and I'll send you a link to a dropbox download (it's code signed and notarized and everything).