(informational lists, not intended to constitute an endorsement by HAL)
General Resources
AstroBackyard Getting Started – Guide explaining how to take your first photo of the stars, the Milky Way, or deep-sky object.
AstroBackyard Book Recommendations – A list of 15 of the best astrophotography books available today for beginners to experienced astrophotographers.
AstroBin – Image hosting platform and social network for astrophotographers. World Wide community of over 50,000 members.
Format Magazine Astrophotography Complete Guide – Tips on finding the best astrophotography equipment for “beginner to pro”.
Galactic Hunter Astrophotography Course – Online astrophotography course designed to help beginners get started and help long-time enthusiasts improve their skills.
OptCorp Astrophotography Tips – Astrophotography tips and gear recommendations (Note: the store is closed, but the website is still up).
PetaPixel Astrophotography Guide – Comprehensive guide including the history of astrophotography, gear, techniques, apps, as well as collection and processing of astronomical images.
Sky & Telescope Astrophotography Tips & Techniques – Tips and tricks to get you started photographing the night sky.
Skies and Scopes Astrophotography Guide – How-to guides, case studies, and equipment recommendations.
Astronomy Software – Windows & Cross-Platform
Astronomy.tools – [free] A collection of useful, free astronomy tools such as FOV calculator, Star Charts, etc.
AutoStakkert4 – [free] AutoStakkert! is all about alignment and stacking of image sequences, minimizing the influence of atmospheric distortions (seeing). Its goal is to create high quality images of the Planets, the Sun, and the Moon, without too much hassle.
BackyardEOS – [$] Software tailor made to control your Canon DSLR camera, purposely built with astro-photography in mind.
BackyardNikon – [$] Software tailor made to control your Nikon DSLR camera, purposely built with astro-photography in mind.
Cartes du Ciel – [free] Planetarium program that enables you to draw sky charts, making use of the data in many catalogs of stars and nebulae, includes planets, asteroids and comets.
Deep-Sky Planner – [$] Comprehensive astronomical planning and logging software for Windows. Discover what you can observe, when and where to observe it, and what it looks like. Once you’ve observed an object, record the observation and exchange it with other astronomy software.
DeepSkyStacker – [free] Simplifies all the pre-processing steps of deep sky pictures.
Distant Suns – [$] 3D flight simulation, live Earth cloud data, and more.
Earth Centered Universe – [$] A planetarium and telescope control program for Windows.
GIMP – [free] GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems.
K3CCDTools – [$] K3CCDTools is a Windows application dedicated for astro-imaging. It includes video-capturing, auto-guiding, frame aligning and stacking and simple image post-processing.
Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy (NINA) – [free] Comprehensive and constantly evolving open source imaging software for Windows. The toolset includes choosing, framing, focusing, centering and imaging one or multiple targets and more.
PHD2 Guiding – Very popular guiding software that simplifies the process of tracking a guide star.
PHD2 Log Viewer– [free] Tool for quickly visualizing your guiding performance and spotting problems in your PHD2 Guide Log.
PixInsight – [$] Advanced image processing platform.
Registar- [$] Automatic image registration for astrophotography.
RegiStax- [free] Software for alignment/stacking/processing of images.
Sequence Generator Pro – [$] Fully automated night sky imaging.
Simulation Curriculum – Earth & Space Science Software for PC and mobile including SkySafari and Starry Night
SkyTools – [$] Observation planning, charting, and logging.
TheSkyX – [$] Desktop planetarium software offering telescope and camera control from Software Bisque.
Startrails– [free] Freeware for Windows to create startrail-images and timelapse movies.
Starry Night – [$] Multi-tasking program with versions for all user levels.
Stellarium- [free] Open-source planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows, & Mac.
Voyager – [$] System integration and astrophotography automation software.
Astronomy Software – MAC only
Ben Software SwiftCapture – [$] High-quality video software for the Mac; video capture, multi-camera video surveillance & IP Camera viewing software.
Equinox6 Webcam Control – [$] Equinox is a planetarium program with filters for organizing deep sky objects and controls for most telescopes. Available from the Mac App Store.
Lynkeos – [free] Lynkeos is a Cocoa (Mac OS X) application dedicated to the processing of astronomical (mainly planetary) images taken with a webcam through a telescope.