software

Downloading Stellarium

Stellarium is a free, open source planetarium application which allows the night sky to be viewed from any location on Earth, on any date. The software can be downloaded from www.stellarium.org, together with installation instructions.

When you open Stellarium, it adopts the date and time from your computer clock - the first screen looks similar to the image here.  read more »

Astrometrica is a simple to use Windows application which will read in raw telescope data (FITS files) for a set of observations, and check to see if there are any moving objects in them. You can ‘blink’ data files to see the object moving, mark its name if its know about, and even report a new asteroid to the Minor Planets Center.  read more »

Iris is a free piece of software for Microsoft Windows that allows you to do basic data processing on astronomical data files. Sometimes you won’t be able to take a long exposure (for example, there might be bright stars in the field of view which would saturate), and you have to take many shorter exposure and then stack them. This guide will run you through stacking FITS images with Iris.  read more »