Slopcap
A capture tool for astro cameras shooting planets, the Moon, and the Sun: focus, collimation, and atmospheric dispersion in one place.
Slopcap is a video capture tool for shooting planets, the Moon, and the Sun. Plug in a ZWO, QHY, or Player One astro camera and it works on Windows, Linux, and macOS: it writes every frame to disk without dropping one, while showing you a live view with brightness and color already dialed in. Getting a sharp shot of a planet is the hard part: Slopcap helps you collimate, focus separately in red, green, and blue, and measure atmospheric dispersion — it even tells you which way to tilt your dispersion corrector. While recording it recognizes whether Jupiter or Saturn is in frame, and names the video files the way WinJUPOS expects, so stacking later is painless. Author Daniel Mead posted it to Hacker News on October 28, 2026, opening with the line that he was not happy with the existing tools for recording planets and the Moon, “so I vibe coded one.” The repo had commits as recently as November 3, version 0.1.2 just shipped, and it has 1 star on GitHub — a very new, very niche tool. Fair warning: this is a serious tool for people who already own an astro camera and a telescope — without a camera there is nothing to play with. The Releases page has ready-made downloads for Windows, Linux, and macOS; install one, plug in your camera, and you are good to go.
@Piper