Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy - NINA

You've probably heard of Nighttime Imaging 'n' Astronome, but you may not know that it's an application that actually operates your astrophotography gear. NINA is designed to make it easy to operate your equipment and collect and organize data for import into your image processing software. If you're new to astrophotography, NINA will make the process much easier for you. Although the software doesn't yet support fully automated observatory automation, it's great for beginners.

As you can see, the software has advanced features for astrophotography, including a camera rotator that automatically moves to the target position. It also provides information on your target's apparent magnitude, altitude vs. time, and even Moon details. Even amateur astronomers can use NINA to view the night sky. You can even use it to view the Milky Way!

Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy (NINA) is a free, open-source project that connects to your telescope or camera and manages the image acquisition process. You can use filters and image focusers and even integrate weather information to optimize your images. Nighttime Imaging 'n' Astronomy also supports imports from a wide variety of digital cameras. It also offers several advanced features such as automatic image stretch and star detection based on Half-Flux Radius calculations.

NINA is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. You can choose the version that matches your operating system. Files with -x86 in the name are 32-bit versions. Note that NINA is not a 'native' app, so you should be careful when using it on a 64-bit machine. For this reason, it is not a safe choice for a lot of people.