APT stands for "AstroPhotography Tool" and it is like Swiss army knife for your astro imaging sessions. No matter what are imaging with - Canon EOS, Nikon, CCD or CMOS astro camera, APT has the right tool for planning, collimating, aligning, focusing, framing, controlling, imaging, synchronizing, scheduling, meridian flipping, analyzing and monitoring. All its features are packed in an easy and comfortable to use interface with design that had no alternative back in 2009 when it was released. Since then APT is constantly being improved and refined by the real experience of many astro photographers from all over the world including one of the APT authors. Currently APT works on MS Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11.

 

APT has time unlimited "demo" version with almost all features of the full one. In fact this "demo" is one of the most loaded astro applications available for free.

 

 

The approach to this document is minimalistic - a description of all features in APT and the related information in the short and easy to use form. The two main sections are Application Interface and APT Features. In the first one you can find explanation for everything you see in APT. The second one is a kind of index of the main APT functions. There are few more sections that are focused on important areas like Dithering, PointCraft and SessionCraft.

 

This guide is designed to use the full power of the hyper-links and to give possibility to track easily all the linked information without text duplication. In the same time is used common naming of the sections in order to make easier for reading if one decide to print it (PDF version here). The User's Guide is not book in its classic form and there is no proper or right way to read it :) You can read it page-by-page or in random order. Every topic contains a focused information and links to all related topics.

 

Special thanks to Dennys Turcotte for his work to make this document better and more clear to read!

 

Special thanks to Mark Kelly for his Youtube channel Southern Cross Amateur Astro! It is a project in progress to make using and understanding APT easier! The User's Guide pages are constantly updated the with links to corresponding video clips from the Mark's channel.