astap program

tylermh1996

Very feature rich, very accurate, and very easy to learn. It's a must have piece of software.

grimstod

ASTAP is now my go to image stacker. It is easy to use and has plenty of power. The developer Han is really helpful and sometimes posts bug fixes within hours of them being reported. I use it exclusively on the Mac.

achim2205

Best Astro program

jordicaldes

Fantastic plate solver software!

fspa

ASTAP delivers highly accurate stacking results even out of mediocre data. Of course there is a steep learning curve at the beginning - as with every high specific AIP[*] software but with some patience I learned step by step what to look for and how to use ASTAP. Basically, the user simply needs to provide light frames ("images"). Calibration data (flats, darks, flat-darks (aka "biases") should be provided by the user but can be committed when not available. * One thing could be significantly be improved, if at all possible: speed! Following the running processes (Linux "htop"), ASTAP seems to never use more than 1 processor even when 8 processors are available. On my 8 core computer, most other AIP software (eg. Siril, StarTools, ...) use as much processing power as provided by my system. I am still learning ... and this will probably never end :-) [*] AIP: Astronomical Image Processing