My Intro and Astrophotography

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Robert Lancaster

I am an amateur photographer and amateur astronomer from Delaware.  We do many aspects of Astronomy in our club, but my main interest is Astrophotography.  We have a strong subgroup of astrophotographers and meet monthly.  I use Mac OS X, so since most of the amateur software was developed for Windows, I was at a disadvantage in that regard. But since I also have an interest in programming, I joined the effort to help develop KStars and INDI.

KStars is a free astrophotography planetarium program and image capture suite so that it would work on all computer platforms including Linux, Windows, and Macs.  It is not the most sophisticated planetarium program out there, but Ekos, its Astrophotography suite is second to none!  INDI is a set of drivers and device sharing programs that can control telescopes, filter wheels, astronomical CCD cameras, DSLR cameras, focusers, and other devices, then share them over the local network so that anybody using an INDI Client (such as Kstars) can control them all wirelessly.  If anyone is interested in helping to develop free software for astrophotography or using free software, please check out KStars and INDI and help us out!

I am interested in Luminar for a couple of reasons.  I have been using Aperture for a number of years now for finishing and organizing all my photos, both regular photography and astrophotography, but now it is getting a bit old.  So I spent some time back in August evaluating many different programs.  Based on what I saw, I think that Luminar with Libraries will be the best fit for me out of all the ones I tested.  When I got my download on December 18th, I was not disappointed.  It works great on my computer and processes my astrophotos even better than Aperture ever did.  I tried to share the love with some of my family members, one with an older Mac and one with a Windows computer.  Unfortunately, it was so slow on their computers it was basically unusable.  I am hoping that some updates in the near future make the experience for them as great as it was for me.  I see a lot of promise in this program for both astrophotography and regular photography, but it needs a little more polishing.

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