Software that runs the whole night.

Automation

Point it at the sky and go to bed

Cool the camera to setpoint, find focus, calibrate the guider, slew, centre on a plate solve, dither, flip the meridian, refocus when the stars start to bloat, shoot flats at dawn, and park. One mount, as many optical trains as it carries.

Refocus triggers on a trend across the last 30 frames, not one bad exposure — a gust or passing haze cannot start a focus run. Backlash is inferred from every successful autofocus rather than measured separately.

Planning

Decide what is actually worth shooting

The scheduler scores catalogued targets for tonight against altitude, the moon, and your own horizon obstructions, then hands each one the slice of the night where it sits highest.

Targets that fit a single pointing are co-framed automatically — pin the Lagoon with a wide enough sensor and the Trifid comes along in the same frame. Comets are computed locally from JPL orbital elements, so their positions and brightness are live rather than a stale list.

Finding

Know where you are pointing

A GPU sky atlas over the full Tycho-2 catalogue, with constellation figures and boundaries, deep-sky overlays, live planet and comet positions, and the mount's own reticle drawn where it currently sits.

Plate solving runs against the same catalogue with no external dependency, so a frame can be solved and the mount synced without installing anything else. ASTAP and astrometry.net are supported as alternatives.

Guiding

Keep the stars round for eight hours

A built-in guider that calibrates itself, guides on a selected star, and dithers between sub-exposures — or PHD2, if that is what you already trust.

Calibration deliberately runs half an hour east of the meridian, so a German equatorial stays on one side of the pier throughout and the declination sense it learns matches the side it will image on. Calibrating west of the meridian is how a mount teaches itself to run away in Dec.

Hardware

Talk to the gear you already own

ASCOM on Windows, Alpaca over HTTP anywhere, native ZWO and QHYCCD SDKs, serial mounts including Meade LX200, SkyWatcher, OnStep and iOptron, and Canon bodies over PTP with no vendor SDK installed at all.

Devices are addressed by URI, so a driver is a string in a profile rather than a compile-time choice, and a headless Raspberry Pi runs the same code as a Windows desktop.

Remote

Watch it from somewhere warm

A headless server exposes the session over REST and WebSocket, and serves the same hardware over the ASCOM Alpaca protocol, so other software can drive it too.

A desktop can bind another node and mirror its run through the same tabs that render a local one. Selecting a rig changes what you are looking at — never what your own machine owns.

# what is the rig doing right now?
$ curl -s localhost:1888/api/v1/session/state | jq '.data.phase, .data.activeObservation.target.name'
"Observing"
"Helix Nebula"

# the same hardware, spoken to as ASCOM Alpaca by anything else on the network
$ curl -s localhost:1888/api/v1/telescope/0/rightascension
{"Value":22.518,"ErrorNumber":0,"ErrorMessage":""}

Inspecting

Look at what came back

Astro Photo Viewer is a second application, shipped on its own through the Microsoft Store: the suite's viewer, without the suite. It opens FITS, SER planetary video, TIFF and Canon CR2/CR3, stretches and demosaics on the GPU, measures every star it finds, and draws a WCS grid with catalogue annotations over a plate-solved frame.

A SER switches to frame playback, and a RAW/STACK toggle runs a rolling lucky-imaging stack that follows the playhead, with six wavelet-sharpen sliders over it. All of it off the render thread, so the sliders stay instant however long a stack takes.

Windows 10 version 2004 or newer, x64 and ARM64, updating itself from the Store. Double-clicking a .fits, .fit, .fts, .fz or .ser opens that file in the window already showing its folder rather than starting another copy. Linux and macOS run the same viewer from a self-contained native AOT archive on GitHub Releases.