Coming soon
Alan Astro finds your target, focuses, guides and works through your plan from dusk to dawn, so you can go to bed. Check in from a laptop, tablet or phone. If anything goes wrong, it tells you what happened and why.
Behind this text: Stephan's Quintet, shot with Alan Astro from a Bortle 8 backyard. 2,800 mm, 38 × 3 min, guiding 0.7″.
Guiding
At 2,800 mm, one arcsecond of error covers several pixels. A guider that only thinks in pixels needs new settings for every scope. Alan Astro's guider checks its limits in arcseconds of sky, so a setting that suits a 250 mm refractor can't end up too small on a 2,800 mm SCT.
The minimum move, the settle limit and the search area each have a floor in arcseconds, worked out for your camera and focal length, so none of them can be set too small.
A guide scope, an off-axis guider or a camera's built-in guide sensor, with binning counted in. It won't start guiding until it knows the pixel scale.
It follows up to five stars and uses the middle value of their movement, so one star in bad seeing can't pull the mount off.
It chooses stars that stand out clearly from the background, not just the brightest, and can skip the stretched stars at the edge of an off-axis guider. On one field, that alone took guiding from 3.38″ to 1.29″ RMS.
It watches the mount drift with no corrections, tells seeing apart from real drift, and suggests a minimum move.
How far one arcsecond of error moves a star on a camera with 3.76 µm pixels. At 2,800 mm it moves almost twelve times as far as at 240 mm, so a limit set in pixels would be wrong by the same amount. That's why the guider checks its limits in arcseconds.
Start the plan and go to bed. Check your frames in the morning.
Any screen
The server runs on the computer at your mount. Open it from any laptop, tablet or phone on the same network. Several screens can follow the same session, and closing one stops nothing.
Tour
Dusk to dawn
A plan runs the whole night, from cooling the camera at dusk to parking the mount at dawn. If the weather turns bad, it pauses and carries on when the sky clears.
Also included
It steps the focuser through focus, fits a curve through the star sizes and tells you how well the curve fits. You don't have to measure backlash first: every move finishes from the same side, so slack in the gears can't move the result. It applies the focus offset you set for each filter, and if a run fails, it says so.
It solves on your own computer, with no internet. On a real night it centred a target to 0.12 arcminutes in two tries. It also reports the focal length it measured, so you'll notice if you forgot the reducer.
Three measurements, then it shows which way to turn the altitude and azimuth knobs, and how far.
Frames are lined up on their stars and stacked as they arrive, with your darks and flats applied. Bad frames are left out, and it tells you why. It can stack a running plan as it goes.
Star size (HFR), star count and roundness for every frame, plus a tilt map that shows which way stars stretch across the field.
Over 18,900 objects: OpenNGC, the Messier, Caldwell and Abell lists, nebula and cluster catalogues such as Sharpless and Barnard, and the planets and comets. It shows what gets high enough in darkness tonight, in the directions you can see. Each target has its altitude curve with your horizon drawn on it, when it's highest and how far it is from the Moon. There's a mosaic planner too.
Six weather limits (wind, gusts, rain, cloud, humidity and dew) pause the night and pick it up again when conditions clear, instead of ending it. A safety monitor that stops answering counts as unsafe. Your own horizon applies to every slew.
One webhook sends you alerts: errors, a plan starting or finishing, and a device dropping out or coming back.
Night mode
Drag the handle to compare. Text, charts and buttons all turn deep red, so your eyes stay used to the dark.
DayNight
Hardware
Download
Alan Astro isn't available to download yet. Want to hear when it is? Email alan.astro.space@gmail.com and we'll let you know.
Installs a Windows service that starts with the computer and serves the app on port 5544. Open the address it shows from any browser on your network.
You won't need an app: any browser on the same network will work.
