One cannot overemphasize the importance of computing software for each and every aspect of astrophotography beginning as early as the first steps following setup when attempting to nail perfect focus to the final step in preparing an image for web presentation and its resampling and compression to JPG format. In fact, one can step back even further and use tools such as PoleAlignMax to confirm and/or finetune the polar alignment of their telescope.

The list below is certainly not exhaustive, for there exist different flavours of software for each step in the image acquisition and processing components, not to mention other steps such as polar alignment, focusing, RAW to TIFF conversions etc. Listed below are simply my favourite tools which I have found to have both very good user interfaces and functionality.