astromatto's black hole – astrophotography on Linux

If you, like me, are used to work on Linux, you are just an OSS enthusiast, you want to pick a responsible choice for your astrophotograpy software or you are simply a penguin, I hope this blog may help you cruising across the infinite and unknown ocean of astrophotography on non-windows computers.

where to start?

For me, where to start was the thing that I spent the most time on. The internet is really empty when it comes to astrophotography and Linux, the biggest problem out there for a person who just starts is the huge amount of things that are needed, leave alone the hardware, the software brings in a lot of different things:

• planetarium software
• equipment drivers
• astrophotography toolbox
• post-processing programs

Stellarium is probably the most known planetarium and works very well on Linux, most of the distros package stellarium so you can usually find it in your distro repository. Stellarium is a great software for visual astronomy but it lacks some fundamental features for astrophotography like mosaic, good DSo background and a framing assistant.
Meet Kstars – Kstars is also a planetarium program, I think is less appealing visually than Stellarium and probably less user-friendly but its big plus is that it’s fully integrated with ekos which is a fully featured astrophotography suite.
If you want to do astrophotography on Linux, Kstars+ekos+INDI is the only way to go, it’s capable to run on PC and Raspberry Pis; but wait, what’s INDI?
INDI is the Windows equivalent for ASCOM, it has the drivers to connect and talk to your equipment.
INDI supports a multitude of devices, for a full list have look at the github repo here => https://github.com/indilib/indi-3rdparty

So, now you have your first pictures uh? What are you supposed to do with your Linux box and a bunch of fits (or xisf) files?
Well, it really depends at this point what’s your philosophy, if you are willing to spend money, than PixInsight is what you are looking for; it is built ON Linux and works and it’s tested on Linux first, if you prefer an open source and free alternative, then you probably wants to look at Siril

If you need a final touch to your post-processed picture there is also GIMP a free and open source program to edit your photos (think of it like a Photoshop)

That’s all, if you, like me, are at the beginning and you feel lost with your penguin friend, hopefully this short summary will help you quickly clarifying what kind of software you may need to be up and running in no time!