N.I.N.A. is an application designed for controlling all hardware used for capturing astrophotography images, from cameras to focusers, filter wheels, rotators, telescope mounts and more. It has a huge range of functions that I won't describe in detail here, and it is gathering a growing following in the astrophotography community.

There is no doubt that N.I.N.A. is a fantastic application, but my personal preference is to use AstroPhotography Tool which has many of the same functions. I simply prefer the user interface in APT. One thing that has been a real benefit to me though is the Hocus Focus plugin for N.I.N.A. After I bought my monochrome camera and filter wheel, I saw some imperfections in images that I had never really noticed before. When shooting with my DSLR the image resolution wasn't quite the same, and minor aberrations in star shapes didn't really catch my eye too much. The improved resolution in the new camera made them visible though.

Having noticed the problem, I wasn't able to just ignore it and I learned that there was a perfect device to correct the sensor tilt issue that I had discovered. The really clever thing about Hocus Focus was that it could use the same tools to measure field curvature and tilt, so I was able to spend several nights making measurements of both effects and taking my time to correct them. I improved the field curvature by adding more space between my field flattener and camera to the point where the tool was telling me that my radius of curve was something over 5 metres, which gives a very flat focal plane relative to the size of my camera sensor. After dealing with the curvature, I measured the sensor tilt and found that there was a difference of up to 100 microns in the distance to opposite corners of the camera sensor from the telescope. This might not sound a lot, but it meant that I was a couple of degrees off from precise orthogonality. Using the Hocus Focus tool in conjunction with my Camera Tilt Unit, I was able to adjust the deviation down to less than 10 microns, which resulted in undetectable differences in the star quality across the whole image frame.

To learn more about other capabilities of N.I.N.A. please visit its website.