Stacking software for mac?

What is the best choice in stacking software for free for mac?

What sort of stacking? Deep sky (nebulae, galaxies, clusters) stacking is different to lunar/planetary.

For deep sky, I'd highly recommend Nebulosity by Craig Stark. Not free, but a very reasonable price. Actually I'm not aware of a free Mac option there.

For planetary, I'm pretty sure you can run Avistack on Mac natively.

That being said, you might be pushing trying to run all Mac-native. Been there, done that. I found there's plenty of image processing software for Mac, but scope control and lots of other cool little bits of software are much more readily available on Windows, so I run VMWare Fusion WinXP virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

Now,if you're really serious about deep sky image processing from calibrating, stacking, to the detailed processing, I really, really recommend now PixInsight. For the price it is very reasonable and very powerful.

Lynkeos is free for the Mac:

http://lynkeos.sourcef​orge.net/

I got it along with Orion's inexpensive Starshoot Solar System Imager but the download from their site is free.

I've played around with it some but my big problem is that I can't get a usable shot or movie file off the imager. Its software, installed on a Mac Air, doesn't work very well so I can't get a good file to use. But Lynkeos seems to have some decent features and the price is right.

Alternatively, if you have Photoshop already you can just use that for simple jobs. Not tried it with anything major yet, I'm pretty new to astro stuff and still gleaning tips from here, but for my first star trail I just imported all the shots (101 in total) as new layers in a PSD file and applied the Lighten layer effect to each layer. Job done!

Not sure how that would work for something like a nebula shot, but I'm sure others on here could tell you. For star trails though, it's an easier solution than finding a piece of Mac software that'll do it for you, I found.

spoonofmilk wrote in post #13336598
For star trails though, it's an easier solution than finding a piece of Mac software that'll do it for you, I found.

If you're in need of star trail software for a Mac I've found that StarStaX works very well.

Star trails and good shots of the milky way are what I am aiming for right now. So aside from spending $40-$60 I guess there isn't much I can do for stacking the milky way.

Aah, gotchya. Do you have Fusion or Parallels and the ability to use Windows on your Mac? Check out the last link in my signature for a post I made here with star trails software, free, but it's Windows.

Oooh, just did a quick google and this popped up. No idea how good it is, but:
http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/​software.html

Let us know how it goes Be interested to see if it calibrates images, ie uses darks, biases etc as well.

troypiggo wrote in post #13339018
Aah, gotchya. Do you have Fusion or Parallels and the ability to use Windows on your Mac? Check out the last link in my signature for a post I made here with star trails software, free, but it's Windows.

Oooh, just did a quick google and this popped up. No idea how good it is, but:
http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/​software.html

Let us know how it goes Be interested to see if it calibrates images, ie uses darks, biases etc as well.

Yes I actually do have Fusion, haven't done much with it but I have it and yes my Mac is intel based. Also, what do you mean by calibrate? I will try StarStax

Calibration is a way of increasing the signal to noise ratio in your astro shots. Kind of like noise reduction. Some good reading here: http://deepskystacker.​free.fr/english/theory​.htm and here: http://deepskystacker.​free.fr/english/faq.ht​m

Probably more for deep sky than star trails, but I do know that StarTrails software for Win will accept darks etc to help reduce noise.