Astronomy software?

Does anyone know of any astronomy software for Macs. I'm getting a telescope soon.
Thanks for your help
Lynn

 

starrynight not sure if it works on a mac.

http://www.starrynightstore.com/stniso.html

 

Thanks hoggie
I looked at that one and it says it will.
Lynn

 

I use Mac Doppler to track satellites for work. Don't know how much use it'll be to you. Looking at the ISS is pretty cool if your telescope is really powerful.

 

Celestia and/or Stellarium, both free.

 

Thanks system 159 and Radcom
I'm planning on doing CCD and digital photo. I'll look into to those. Everyone in my astro club has windows, I don't want windows I'm switching to MBP. Unfourtullay it will be next year before I get my MBP

Lynn

 

I've tried Celestia, SkyOrb and Stellarium. Celestia is really fun and nice, but not really for stargazing, more for exploring the solar system and universe.
SkyOrb is nice and works well, and so is Stellarium. Stellarium has the better atmospheric effect (switchable on/off) but IMO they are pretty equal in most other respects. Stellariums interface maybe a bit more polished, but it has some minor issues at the moment as they updated their rendering engine a short while ago and are working out the kinks.

As far as I know they don't support any kind of linking to a telescope for targeting, I don't know how valuable a feature that would be, don't have anything servo driven yet

 

The advantage of stellarium is that you can set your location with gps coordinates and it will try to place things in the right area in the sky for the time and season. so you can try to visually find what you are looking for.

 

You can set SkyOrb to GPS coordinates as well and it should show the sky above you. (that's the whole point, innit)
Skyorbs rendering is pretty good as well, properly taking into account refraction. You can set the atmospheric pressure and temp to get it as accurate as possible. The interface is, again, a bit clunky, but the rogram is good.

 

Which CCD are you using? A lot of the astro CCD's and most of the better imaging software suites (I use MaximDL with a DSI) are not compatible with a Mac.
I actually use a dedicated, older laptop (most require USB 2.0, decent amount of RAM, and something over 1ghz proc) for imaging outside and guiding the mount.
You may want to consider that option.

Head over to cloudynights.com and go to their software section, they have quite a large following for Macs.

 

Starry Night works great on a mac, just make sure you have the required hardware to run it especially if you want to run it in open gl, Starry Night is a hybrid and is made to run on osx and windows.

 

Thanks everyone I'll look into those programs. I have been haging out at cloudynights and looked at the mac software section.
Thanks again
Lynn

 

Keep in mind, you can always use bootcamp to boot into Windows on a Mac in case you need a software that only works on Windows.