I am happy with NINA and its growing functionality. The advanced sequencer offers so much possibilities. They are awesome to customize your observatory, to alarm you in case of emergency or help you to correct your polar alignment (nearly as SharpCap does). Another big thing are the plugins that are available in the nightly versions. It is customizable in many ways and I never saw it crash (and I use the nightly builds). It handles so much hardware easily and has a lot of stuff that is really helpful to speed up the imaging sessions. It was really easy to get into the program. It seemed to offer all the things I need, has a really great user interface, is intuitive and is also free. I still use it as Backup system and to log different weather data or to check the equipment with a webcam. But after some problems, I switched back to my windows Laptop. The Raspberry could easily be mounted on the Telescope itself, which allows for easier cable management. I also own Sharpcap Pro for different reasons but I never aimed to use it for my imaging sessions.įor a while I tried to use a Raspberry Pi with KStars and Ecos. Also the amount of open windows was really frustrating if you use an imaging Laptop with a small screen resolution. I always had to look for different functions. This worked really well, but the user Interface was not made for my logical thinking. But it missed some functions and so I switched to APT. I try to answer this question without reading the comments from other users (will do it afterwards). To be honest a quick google search will tell you everything you need to know. Outside of that it does not have the capability to be a full fledged astrophoto program and it never will. I use sharpcap to polaralign and do lunar/short exposure untracked imaging. Sharpcap and firecapture are more comparable. I would compare NINA and SGP both of which are better and more advanced for remote and automated photography. APT is crude, though it has gotten better over time. With NINA you can run an automated sequence and go to sleep.

Sharpcap and NINA can't be put in the same category. Please feel free to correct me if I have misunderstood. So given that we already have APT and SharpCap, what (if anything) does NINA add to that?Īm I making a category error here, or is it purely a matter of personal preference between NINA, SharpCap and APT?īear in mind I am new to this, so just asking a genuine question to try and learn something. A lot of people on astrobin refer to NINA.Īs far as I can work out this is image acquisition software.

Astronomy plate solving software