Naturally, non-native cameras are supported via ASCOM if those cameras have an ASCOM driver. Native support for Atik, Altair, QHYCCD, ToupTek, and ZWO astronomy cameras as well as Canon and Nikon DSLRs.Integrated control of telescope mount, camera, filter wheel, focuser, and rotator.The NINA documentation goes over them in detail. Here’s a quick synopsis of the features in NINA as of version 1.8.0. Image processing is a world unto itself with a plethora of options, methods, and of course opinions. The sole purpose of NINA is to operate your astrophotography gear, get you the exposures you desire, and organize that collected data so that you can then import it into image processing software of your choice (such as PixInsight).
NINA is not an image processing application. For the vast majority of amateur astrophotographers, however, NINA’s feature set is both powerful and, most importantly, accessible.
PLATE SOLVING SOFTWARE FOR ASCOM FULL
Full observatory automation is not on the roadmap right now as the team wants to focus on developing the basics first. NINA is designed to be accommodating to the new astrophotographer as well as seasoned ones. This means one may press “Start” on the sequence and go do other things: watch TV, enjoy visual astronomy through another telescope, or even just go to bed knowing that the application will take care of all the hardware manipulation and data collection and collation itself. The idea with such a sequencing app is to compose an astrophotography session and have the app drive it from start to finish. Tell the filter wheel to rotate to the red filter and take another N exposures, perform a dither… and so-on. Take N exposures at X gain (or ISO) and Y shutter speed. Select the luminance filter in the filter wheel. It operates a to-do list done in sequential order: Point the telescope to this part of the sky. In the basic sense, NINA is a program where one sets up a session that contains sequences of hardware control actions and exposures. My personal interest on this project is implementing and touching-up direct (“native”) camera control integration and UI tweaks where needed.
PLATE SOLVING SOFTWARE FOR ASCOM WINDOWS
Learning Visual Studio, C#, WPF, and the particulars of Windows programming environments was fun and easier than I had expected. On a personal note, this was my very first introduction to programming on Windows and GUI apps in general. NINA stands out in this regard in that it is fully-featured, opensource (GNU GPLv3) and, hence, freely available. The idea of well-featured apps being opensource or freeware is a relatively recent development in this niche world, as the list of such apps is abysmally small relative to the large variety of payware apps that are available. As such, astrophotography apps tend to follow a closed-source, shareware or freemium/commercial-only model. An artifact of several historical reasons, the world of computer-controlled astrophotography is dominated by Windows applications. NINA is ground-breaking both in the hobby of amateur astrophotography and personally. I have been involved in a new opensource project over the past several months called Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy (“NINA”).
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