Astrophotography Software for Mac: 6 Apps, ZWO Still Intel

ZWO makes the most common astronomy cameras on Amazon, and its own Mac app doesn't start on my Mac. ASIStudio 1.22, the bundle that holds ASICap, ASIImg, ASILive and nine other tools, contains 97 binaries, and every one is Intel-only. On an M4 Mac mini without Rosetta it stops at Bad CPU type in executable. PHD2, the free guiding program most imaging setups use, fails the same way. KStars, the one full capture suite with a native Apple Silicon build, launches fine, but its arm64 download leaves out the drivers for ZWO cameras.

Scope first. I don't own a telescope or an astronomy camera, so nothing here captured a frame, guided a mount or stacked a real image. What I did on 2026-10-20: downloaded the current Mac builds of ASIStudio, PHD2, KStars, Siril, GraXpert and ASTAP onto that Mac mini (macOS 26.4.1), checked every executable and library with lipo, read the signatures with codesign and Gatekeeper's verdict with spctl, and launched each app for 12 seconds to see whether it stayed up. For KStars I also downloaded the Intel build and compared the two driver lists file by file. Windows-only programs are covered from their own requirement pages. Owner reports come from bug trackers and forums, linked where I use them.

Six Mac astrophotography apps on an M4

App	Job	Build checked	Binaries	Gatekeeper	On this Mac
ZWO ASIStudio	Capture, live stacking, ZWO tools	1.22.0, signed 2026-09-02	97, all Intel-only	Accepted: Developer ID, notarized	Won't start: Bad CPU type
PHD2	Guiding	2.6.14 (Sonoma+ build), 2025-12-10	11; main program Intel-only, 2 camera libraries universal	Rejected: no usable signature	Won't start: Bad CPU type
KStars / Ekos	Planetarium, capture, guiding, scheduling	3.8.5 Apple Silicon build, 2026-10-03	975: 974 native, 1 Intel-only helper	Accepted: Developer ID, notarized	Runs; no ZWO, SVBONY, Atik, Astroasis or SBIG drivers
Siril	Stacking, processing	1.4.4, 2026-06-17	182, all native	Accepted: Developer ID, notarized	Runs
GraXpert	Gradient removal, denoise	3.0.2, 2024-05-03	413, all native	Rejected: ad-hoc signature	Runs
ASTAP	Plate solving, stacking	2026.10.08 (M1 zip)	1, native	Ad-hoc signature only	Runs

The split is clean. Processing has caught up with Apple Silicon: Siril, GraXpert and ASTAP all run natively. Capture and guiding, the half that talks to cameras and mounts over USB, still leans on Intel code.

ASIStudio: ZWO's own app is Intel-only

The ASIStudio page offers four downloads: Linux, Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit and "macIntel". There is no Apple Silicon build. I tried the obvious variants on ZWO's download service; platform=macIntel redirected to ASIStudio_V1.22.dmg, while macArm, macM1 and mac each returned HTTP 400 with "Service exception, please try again later". The disk image itself is professionally packaged: signed by SuZhou ZWO Co., Ltd., notarized by Apple, minimum macOS 10.12. All 97 Mach-O files inside, including the main program and the 12 apps it launches, are x86_64.

On an Apple Silicon Mac with Rosetta installed, macOS translates it and it should run. Without Rosetta, nothing in ASIStudio opens. Installing Rosetta is one command:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

What makes this odd is that ZWO already builds its camera library for Apple Silicon. The KStars arm64 bundle I downloaded ships ZWO's libASICamera2 1.41 compiled for arm64, along with arm64 builds of the EAF focuser, EFW filter wheel and CAA rotator libraries. ZWO has the native pieces; its own app just isn't built from them.

KStars 3.8.5: native, minus 15 camera drivers

KStars, with its Ekos imaging module and the INDI driver stack, is the closest thing the Mac has to N.I.N.A. The 3.8.5 release post says "We are providing arm64 (Apple Silicon) and x86_64 variants for the MacOS release." The Apple Silicon build is notarized and launched cleanly. Its program files require macOS 13.3, even though a commenter on that post points out the download page lists 10.15 or later. Another commenter reports that 3.8.5 won't install on an Intel Mac running Big Sur 11.7.10.

The missing drivers are the part a buyer needs to know about. I listed every indi_* program in both 3.8.5 downloads. The Intel build has 340, the Apple Silicon build has 325, and nothing is in the arm64 build that isn't in the Intel one. The 15 that are missing:

The missing ZWO drivers are indi_asi_ccd, indi_asi_single_ccd, indi_asi_wheel, indi_asi_focuser, indi_asi_rotator and indi_asi_st4. The driver catalogue inside the app still lists "ZWO CCD", so Ekos shows the camera as a choice, and the arm64 ZWO libraries sit in the Frameworks folder with valid signatures. I searched every program in the bundle and none of them links libASICamera2. The libraries ship with nothing that uses them.

This has been reported. KDE bug 526895 describes exactly this gap, and on 2026-10-10 the KStars maintainer closed it as "NOT A BUG": "these are supplied by the manufacturer and we don't have arm64 builds for them." A day later another user opened indi-3rdparty issue #1396 showing that ZWO, SVBONY and Atik all publish arm64 SDKs, and the maintainer closed it the same morning as fixed in commits 576c17db and f5e71665. For ZWO, his explanation was that "the arm64 libraries were already present, but their ad-hoc code signatures were stale after the @rpath fix-ups." He also wrote that one SVBONY driver family "stays disabled," and asked for testing "with the next nightly/DMG build." As of today, the only 3.8.5 disk image is the one without the drivers.

Until a new build ships, a ZWO owner on Apple Silicon has two routes. Install Rosetta and use the Intel KStars download, which has all six ZWO drivers. Or run the INDI server on a small Linux box or Raspberry Pi at the telescope and point Ekos at it over the network, which is how many people run KStars anyway. Mac camera support had rough edges before this, too: in a 2023 KDE Discuss thread, an M1 MacBook Air owner on KStars 3.6.7 wrote that "When i make a new Profile in Ekos it can't start the Indi" and "Several times i tried to start the Ekos the whole kstars crashes." The simulator camera worked; the real one didn't. Nobody posted a fix.

KStars leaves a background service running

The first launch also wrote ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-kstars.plist, a user launch agent that starts the D-Bus daemon from inside the KStars app with KeepAlive and RunAtLoad both on. When I stopped KStars, launchd started a fresh dbus-daemon within a second, and it would have started it again at every login. I stopped KStars with a signal rather than the Quit menu, so a normal quit may behave differently, but the plist stays either way. If you delete the app, remove the agent too (LaunchAgent vs LaunchDaemon explains the difference between the two folders):

launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/org.freedesktop.dbus-kstars
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-kstars.plist

PHD2: guiding still needs Rosetta

PHD2 2.6.14, released 2025-12-10, comes in two Mac builds on its download page, one for Sonoma and later and one for Ventura and older. Neither is described as Apple Silicon, and the Sonoma build confirms it: the main program is x86_64. The camera libraries are mixed. Player One and ToupTek are universal, but the ZWO, QHY, SVBONY and SBIG libraries are Intel-only, and the ZWO and SBIG ones still carry 32-bit i386 code. The app has no usable signature, so Gatekeeper rejects it until you allow it in System Settings. KStars has its own internal guider, which is native, so an all-native setup today means guiding inside Ekos instead of PHD2.

Processing is native: Siril, GraXpert, ASTAP

Stacking and editing are in better shape. Siril 1.4.4 ships separate Intel and Apple Silicon disk images; the arm64 one is notarized, has 182 native binaries and needs macOS 13.3. GraXpert's arm64 download is native across 413 files but carries only an ad-hoc signature, so expect the "Open Anyway" step. Its last stable release is 3.0.2 from May 2024; 3.1.0 has been at release candidate 2 since January 2025. ASTAP, the plate solver Ekos and many other programs call out to, offers an M1 build that is a single native binary dated 2026-10-08.

Windows-only: N.I.N.A., SharpCap, FireCapture

The autocomplete questions "is nina available for mac" and "sharpcap equivalent for mac" have short answers. N.I.N.A.'s requirements page lists "Windows 10 (64 bit) or later." SharpCap's download page says "Sharpcap runs on Microsoft Windows," with 4.1.14310 from July 2026 as the current release. FireCapture, the planetary capture tool, does list a Mac download, but its site labels it "FC v2.7.15 (x64)." Its download sits behind a question prompt, so I didn't fetch it and can't say what's inside.

What to install, by setup

For a planetary camera on an Apple Silicon Mac without Rosetta, there's no ZWO capture path today: ASIStudio and FireCapture are Intel, and KStars arm64 has no ZWO driver. Install Rosetta, and both ASIStudio and the Intel KStars become options. For deep-sky imaging, KStars with Ekos covers capture, focusing, plate solving through ASTAP and guiding in one program; on Apple Silicon it works natively with Player One, QHY, ToupTek and Canon or gPhoto-supported cameras. For processing, Siril plus GraXpert runs natively with no Rosetta at all. Mounts usually connect through a USB serial cable, and USB to serial adapters on a Mac lists the chips macOS drives without extra software. If you need accurate time and location at a dark site, GPS receivers for Mac covers that. The same Intel-or-native audit for workshop software is in CNC software for Mac, and DJ controller software for Mac found a similar Rosetta split in Pioneer's packages.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The ZWO ASI662MC, a 2.1-megapixel USB 3.0 color camera aimed at planetary imaging, was $199.00 and in stock, fulfilled by Amazon, for a New York address as of 2026-10-20. I haven't used one. On a Mac, read the sections above first: ZWO's own software for it needs Rosetta, and KStars needs either Rosetta or the next DMG. If you want native KStars support on Apple Silicon today, Player One and QHY cameras have their drivers in the arm64 build.

FAQ

Does ZWO ASIStudio run on Apple Silicon Macs?

Only through Rosetta. ZWO offers ASIStudio for Mac only as an Intel build. Version 1.22 contains 97 binaries, all x86_64, so on an Apple Silicon Mac without Rosetta it fails with "Bad CPU type in executable." Installing Rosetta with softwareupdate --install-rosetta lets it run.

Is N.I.N.A. available for Mac?

No. N.I.N.A. requires Windows 10 64-bit or later, and SharpCap is also Windows-only. The closest Mac equivalent is KStars with its Ekos module, which handles capture, focusing, plate solving, guiding and scheduling and has a native Apple Silicon build as of version 3.8.5.

Why can't KStars find my ZWO camera on an M1 or M4 Mac?

The KStars 3.8.5 Apple Silicon download doesn't include the ZWO INDI drivers (indi_asi_ccd and five others), and it also lacks SVBONY, Atik, Astroasis and SBIG drivers. The Intel download has them. Use the Intel build under Rosetta, run INDI on another computer, or wait for the next build: the drivers were enabled upstream on 2026-10-11.

How this was checked: on 2026-10-20 I downloaded ASIStudio 1.22, PHD2 2.6.14 (Sonoma+ build), KStars 3.8.5 (both the Apple Silicon and Intel disk images), Siril 1.4.4, GraXpert 3.0.2 and ASTAP 2026.10.08 from their official download pages onto an M4 Mac mini running macOS 26.4.1 without Rosetta. I checked every Mach-O file with lipo, the signatures with codesign, spctl and stapler, compared the two KStars driver lists by filename, checked which KStars programs link ZWO's library with grep, and launched each app for 12 seconds. No camera or mount was connected, so none of this shows image quality or how well any driver works. N.I.N.A., SharpCap and FireCapture facts come from their own pages. The Amazon price and stock were read the same day with a New York delivery address.