Astronomy Software
Apple macOS (Mac)

macOS

The astronomy software, programs and applications can help you in locating and observing astronomical objects as well as helping you to learn more about them.

If you love Astronomy and Space, these applications can help you in order to improve your astronomy knowledge.

Here, you can find the best one for your needs, whether you are an amateur or a professional, and if you are looking for free or commercial software.

This is a list of software and applications for Apple macOS (previously Mac OS X, then OS X) related to Astronomy and Space:


Aladin Sky Atlas Desktop

Download:https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/
Licence:Free
Language:English
Developer:CDS
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Aladin Sky Atlas Desktop

Description:
Aladin Desktop is the main application of the Aladin Sky Atlas suite. This application allows the user to visualize and manipulate digitized astronomical images or full surveys, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the Simbad database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known astronomical objects in the field.
Aladin Desktop is a widely-used java tool capable of addressing challenges such as locating data of interest, accessing and exploring distributed datasets, visualizing multi-wavelength data. Compliance with existing or emerging VO standards, interconnection with other visualisation or analysis tools, ability to easily compare heterogeneous data are key topics allowing Aladin to be a powerful data exploration and integration tool as well as a science enabler. Aladin Desktop is based on Java techonology. It requires a classical installation on the user machine.

Celestia

Download:https://celestia.space/
Licence:Free
Language:English
Developer:Celestia Development Team
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Celestia

Description:
The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Gaia Sky

Download:https://zah.uni-heidelberg.de/institutes/ari/gaia/outreach/gaiasky/
Licence:Open Source (Free)
Language:English, Spanish, German, French, Catalan, ...
Developer:Universität Heidelberg
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Gaia Sky

Description:
Gaia Sky is a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation software that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. It is developed in the framework of ESA's Gaia mission to chart about 1 billion stars of our Galaxy in the Gaia group of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ZAH, Universität Heidelberg).

- Free and open source - Gaia Sky is open and free, and will stay this way. Contribute to the development and translations.
- From Gaia to the cosmos - Move freely through the cosmos or explore the Solar System in a seamless manner!
- Gaia - Observe Gaia in its orbit and discover its movement in the sky and its attitude.
- Virtual Reality - The whole Universe in VR!
- 6D exploration - Represents star positions but also proper motions and radial velocities, if available.
- Planetary surfaces - Explore surfaces with elevation maps (using tessellation, if available).
- 3D-ready - With 6 stereoscopic modes: Anaglyphic (red-cyan), VR headset, 3DTV (H and V), cross-eye and parallel view.
- 360 mode - With sperhical (equirectangular), cylindrical and Hammer projections.
- Planetarium projection mode - Ready to produce videos for full dome systems.
- Use your data - Bundles Gaia DR2, NBG, SDSS and MWSC. Supports VOTable, FITS, CSV and others (STIL).
- Real-time filters - Filter any dataset by distance, magnitude, galactic, ecliptic, equatorial coordinates, and more.
- SAMP aware - Implements SAMP commands to interoperate with SAMP-ready software such as Topcat and Aladin.
- Navigate the galaxy - Support for controllers and gamepads makes navigating the Galaxy a piece of cake.
- Record and play your camera paths - Ready to record and play camera paths off-the-shelf.
- Scriptable and extensible - Use Python to script and extend the capabilities of the Gaia Sky.
- Internationalised - Translated so far to English, German, Spanish, French, Catalan and Slovenian.

Google Earth Pro

Download:http://earth.google.com/
Licence:Free
Language:English
Developer:Google
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Google Earth Pro

Description:
Explore the world in 3D. The application lets you zoom in any part of the world.
Explore the Earth, but also the sky, the Moon and Mars.

KStars

Download:http://edu.kde.org/kstars/
Licence:Open Source (Free)
Language:English
Developer:KStars Team
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
KStars

Description:
KStars is free, open source, cross-platform Astronomy Software. It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites.
For students and teachers, it supports adjustable simulation speeds in order to view phenomena that happen over long timescales, the KStars Astrocalculator to predict conjunctions, and many common astronomical calculations.
For the amateur astronomer, it provides an observation planner, a sky calendar tool, and an FOV editor to calculate field of view of equipment and display them. Find out interesting objects in the "What's up Tonight" tool, plot altitude vs. time graphs for any object, print high-quality sky charts, and gain access to lots of information and resources to help you explore the universe! Included with KStars is Ekos astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, DSLRs, focusers, filters, and a lot more. Ekos supports highly accurate tracking using online and offline astrometry solver, autofocus and autoguiding capabilities, and capture of single or multiple images using the powerful built in sequence manager.

Night Sky

Download:https://www.icandiapps.com/night-sky-4/
Licence:Free
Language:English
Developer:iCandi Apps
Operating System:macOS iPhone iPad 
Night Sky

Description:
Night Sky is a powerful personal planetarium.
Quickly identify stars, planets, constellations and satellites in your own beautiful personal planetarium! This is all done magically. Whether you’re looking for a constellation or the International Space Station, research it with Night Sky from the comfort of your Mac!
Completely synced with Night Sky on your iOS/iPadOS device, the macOS version brings all your Sky Tours, Sky Notifications, Favorite Objects, and beautiful Moon Tours to the big screen of your Mac! Making it the perfect tool for research projects and browsing the sky in comfort.

Feature set:
- SUPER POWERFUL SKY VIEW - Sky View has been massively upgraded for Night Sky 7! With over 60 million more stars, 8X higher resolution for light spectrum textures, sunrise/sunset effects and new daylight mode!
- MAPS UI - A brand new clean and familiar interface for Night Sky 7, with new Search features with Quick Find, intelligent Night Red Mode, Light Pollution indicator and beautiful feature tiles prepare to navigate Night Sky quicker than ever before!
- AURORA MAPPING (Premium Feature) - See where the Aurora is most visible with the nearest Aurora viewing locations to you highlighted. Complete with Aurora alerts!
- PLANET INTERNAL STRUCTURES - With the tap of a button reveal the internal structures of the planets of the Solar System.
- NIGHT SKY QUIZ - Test your knowledge of Night Sky with a new inbuilt quiz that supports ClassKit. Keep track of your students scores on various topics from Space History, Satellites, Stars and Living in Space!
- AR OBJECT EXPLORATION - Pull Planets, Stars and Constellations out of the sky and look at them in great detail and even share the object via iMessage with USDZ!
- NIGHT SKY SIRI SHORTCUTS - “Hey Siri, show me where the International Space Station is!”… create a Siri Shortcuts, then just ask Siri where any planet or even the ISS is, and Night Sky will direct you to it!
- NIGHT SKY TOURS (Premium Feature): Get a live tour or create your own tours for any location and time in the world!
- MY SKY NOTIFICATIONS - Completely customize your notifications in Night Sky. Favorite any object and be informed when that object is rising for your current location.

Skychart / Cartes du Ciel

Download:https://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/start
Licence:Open Source (Free)
Language:English
Developer:Community
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Skychart / Cartes du Ciel

Description:
This program enables you to draw sky charts, making use of the data in 16 catalogs of stars and nebulae. In addition the position of planets, asteroids and comets are shown.
The purpose of this program is to prepare different sky maps for a particular observation. A large number of parameters help you to choose specifically or automatically which catalogs to use, the colour and the dimension of stars and nebulae, the representation of planets, the display of labels and coordinate grids, the superposition of pictures, the condition of visibility and more. All these features make this celestial atlas more complete than a conventional planetarium.

SkySafari 6

Download:https://skysafariastronomy.com/skysafari-6-professional-astronomy-telescope-control-software-for-mac-osx.html
Licence:Commercial
Language:English
Developer:Simulation Curriculum Corp.
Operating System:macOS 
SkySafari 6

Description:
Accurate Simulation: Simulate the sky from anywhere on Earth, up to 10000 years in the past or future. Animate transits, conjunctions, eclipses, and other events with time controls.
Telescope Control: With our SkyFi 3 wireless telescope control SkySafari Plus & Pro apps can point your computer-controlled telescope anywhere in the sky.
Precision Graphics: Computing the positions of solar system objects to sub-arcsecond precision with the latest JPL planetary ephemerides.
Astronomical Encyclopedia: Thousands of encyclopedic descriptions of the constellations, stars, planets and deep-sky objects written by professionals.
Astrophotography: Hundreds of images from NASA space missions, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the world's foremost astrophotographers.
Largest App Database: 100,000,000+ stars, 3,000,000+ galaxies, and over 750,000+ solar system objects, including every comet and asteroid ever discovered.

Stellarium

Download:http://stellarium.org/en/
Licence:Open Source (Free)
Language:English, Spanish, French
Developer:Stellarium Team
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux Web 
Stellarium

Description:
Stellarium is a planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Features:
- Sky:
  • default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
  • extra catalogues with more than 177 million stars
  • default catalogue of over 80,000 deep-sky objects
  • extra catalogue with more than 1 million deep-sky objects
  • asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
  • constellations for 20+ different cultures
  • images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
  • realistic Milky Way
  • very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
  • the planets and their satellites

- Interface:
  • a powerful zoom
  • time control
  • multilingual interface
  • fisheye projection for planetarium domes
  • spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
  • all new graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
  • telescope control

- Visualisation:
  • equatorial and azimuthal grids
  • star twinkling
  • shooting stars
  • tails of comets
  • iridium flares simulation
  • eclipse simulation
  • supernovae and novae simulation
  • 3D sceneries
  • skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

- Customizability:
  • plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescope configuration and more
  • ability to add new solar system objects from online resources...
  • add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...

Winstars 3

Download:https://winstars.net/en/
Licence:Shareware
Language:English, Spanish, French, German, Russian
Developer:Franck Richard
Operating System:Windows macOS Linux 
Winstars 3

Description:
WinStars 3 is a planetarium for almost any platform. Employing 3D technology to display our solar system in a realistic manner, users may tour the planets, follow a space probe on its long voyage, or observe a celestial event from a distant world, as well as receiving the latest astrophysical news from a live feed.

Features:
- Gaia DR2 catalogue with more than 1.7 billion stars (internet connection needed).
- More than 30,000 galaxies, nebulae, star clusters (OpenNGC + EDD Catalogues).
- A direction of observation which is easily controlled by a mouse and in real time.
- A precise representation of the observable sky from a point on the Earth’s surface on a given date.
- A 3D interface to give more realism to celestial objects.
- Virtual textures to display high resolution surface details of planets.
- Travel throughout the solar system, to over 200,000 stars, the edge of our galaxy and beyond.
- Follows the latest scientific news by downloading additional modules.
- A calculation of notable astronomical phenomena visible from an observation point on the earth.
- Detailed information about each object.
- A calculation of positions of the principal satellites of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, of comets and of asteroids.
- An outline of the celestial equator, the ecliptic, and a grid of azimuthal and equatorial coordinates.
- A 3D outline of the planetary orbits.
- Сontrol a large range of telescopes.
- Internet resources are also available:
updated comets and asteroids’ elements, querying of DSS (Digitized Sky Survey) servers to obtain a photograph of that portion of the sky being displayed by the program, a notice of the visibility of artificial satellites, etc.
- Automatic updates.
- Available languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian