The arc of a night.

Sky Atlas & planning

Know tonight’s sky before dark.

Browse a deep-sky catalog rendered the way it deserves — or let Best tonight rank what’s worth shooting tonight, for your rig, from your yard — then hand your picks straight to tonight’s plan.

• Best tonight ranks targets for the rig you’re using — altitude, the cloud forecast, the Moon, and how each one fits your frame
• A Tonight panel with a suggested order, the next three nights side by side, and each rig’s pick when you run more than one
• Deep-sky catalog with constellation art and rich object data
• Altitude & transit charts computed for your site
• Tonight’s path drawn across the sky — and rise, apex, and set marked only when they really happen
• Framing that matches your exact sensor, optics, and rotation
• Search planets and the Moon — live positions, rise and set, right in the atlas
• Import your Telescopius lists — CSV target lists and mosaic plans drop straight into your plans

Rig setup

One checklist, first connection to first light.

Connect a new rig and ARIS asks to set it up. Rig setup lists everything the rig needs before a night of imaging, in an order that keeps your data good — your settings and calibration frames indoors, then focus, alignment and guiding under the stars. Tap Run the rest and the rig works through a half on its own, stopping only where it needs your hands.

• Up to 21 steps in two halves, Indoors and Under the stars — only the ones your equipment needs
• Every row says who does it, YOU or RIG, and where it stands — “gain 100 → offset 50”, “7 filters to train”
• A step is done when the rig holds the proof: a trained flat profile, frames on disk, a measured backlash
• Every slew asks first, with the RA and Dec it will go to — and the run never parks the mount
• Under the stars waits for dark. Close the app: a paired rig tells your phone when it needs you
• Change the camera’s gain and the offset, flats, bias and darks open again for the new gain

Automated sequencing

Press start. Wake up to data.

Build multi-target, multi-filter exposure plans and let ARIS run the night: it flips the meridian on schedule, refocuses when the temperature drifts, and shoots your calibration frames before dawn. You sleep; the rig works.

• Multiple targets, filters, and exposure plans per night
• Automatic meridian flips with re-center and guiding resume — designed to hold your framing through the flip
• Autofocus triggers on time, temperature, or filter change
• The whole night runs on the rig itself — close your laptop, the sequence keeps shooting
• Darks, flats, and bias runs are sequence steps — calibration happens while you sleep
• An honest finish time — the estimate prices slews, autofocus, filter changes, dithers, and flips from what your rig actually measured

Calibration

Calibration that runs itself.

Flats, darks and bias run as steps of a sequence, or as a run of their own with no target — on the rig, so they finish with the app closed. At the end of a sequence, flats turn the rotator to every angle your lights were shot at, and each flat lands in the folder of the lights it calibrates.

• Shoot flats, darks or bias any time — in a sequence, or on their own from the Flat Panel or Files screen
• Trained flat profiles: the flat wizard finds each filter’s panel brightness and exposure, and nothing is saved until you accept it
• Flats at each target’s rotator angle — at the end of a sequence the rig turns to each angle, shoots that target’s filters, and turns back
• Flats saved with their lights, in the same project and target folder
• Find best offset measures the lowest camera offset at which no pixel reads zero, and adds a safety margin
• Darks and bias wait for the camera to reach its cooler target, and shoot through a wheel slot named Dark or Blank if you have one

Focus & guiding

Focus that proves itself.

Bracketed autofocus only trusts a minimum it has actually surrounded: four rising points on each side — three where the focuser’s range ends. It lands on a verification frame, not a hope. Start way out of focus and a coarse-seek rescue walks it home; any failure returns the focuser exactly where it started. The new Focus screen shows its work: live V-curve, the actual star it’s measuring with an HFR ring, fit quality, step size. Guiding is built-in PHD2 — it is PHD2 — with live RA/Dec graphs, RMS readouts, and a stability gate that holds the next frame until your stars settle — and ARIS works out PHD2’s own settings for your mount and guide optics.

• Bracketed fit — four rising points on each side, three where the focuser’s range ends, never an extrapolated minimum
• Coarse-seek rescue walks home from badly-out-of-focus starts
• Verification frame confirms the result; any failure returns the focuser to start
• Re-runs on temperature drift, filter change, or after a meridian flip
• PHD2 guiding with a per-frame stability gate
• Aggression sliders that actually reach PHD2 — set a value and the rig reads the real one back
• Dithering ARIS owns: every dither travels exactly the distance you set, in a random direction — and settles in seconds
• Guiding-quality metrics measured continuously on the rig — oscillation, windowed RMS, settle times
• Advanced guiding works out PHD2’s algorithm, minimum move, calibration step, pulse limits and star search for your mount and guide optics — hand any of them to ARIS, and after a calibration it tells you when a better value is waiting
• A guide exposure and gain for each filter, applied whenever the wheel lands on it — for guide sensors that look through the filters

Rig Guardian

While you sleep, the rig watches.

Unattended imaging gets an actual night watchman. Guardian journals the night as it happens, alerts your phone when something needs you, and if a sequence fails it returns the mount to your chosen safe state instead of leaving it tracking.

• Night journal + morning report — ask “what happened last night?”
• Critical alerts on your phone’s lock screen; warnings batched
• On any unattended failure the mount goes to your safe state — home, park, or tracking-off — automatically
• Sprinklers stand down — pair a supported controller, starting with Rachio, and ARIS holds the watering on the controllers you choose while a rig is set to Outside, then lets it resume on its own when the rig comes back in
• Opt-in night mode pauses subs when guiding or sky degrade and reacquires the target when clouds clear (early access)

SkyNode

Give your rig eyes.

One fisheye camera turns the forecast into ground truth. ARIS reads the frames photometrically — live clouds on your planning chart, a measured clear-or-overcast verdict, real sky-quality numbers — and every smart feature gets sharper for it.

• A marker on the live fisheye shows exactly where your telescope is pointing — every rig in the array gets its own
• Live cloud map projected on the sky chart — watch what’s drifting toward your target
• Clear or overcast measured photometrically from frames, not forecasts
• Sky-quality (SQM) readings calibrated from your camera
• Calibrates itself against the stars — about a quarter-degree accuracy from a single night frame
• Smart masking learns your site — trees, buildings, the Moon, and passing aircraft don’t read as clouds
• Guardian corroborates with the camera before it acts; GUPPI answers “how’s the sky?” from the same eyes
• A focus screen for a SkyNode’s lens — a big sharpness number that holds its peak while you turn the barrel

Watch and TV apps

The whole night on your wrist.

Raise your wrist and know. On Apple Watch and Galaxy Watch, every rig gets its own glance — sequence progress, the exposure, guiding, the sensor, the finish time and Guardian’s state — with pause and resume one tap away. The commands that end a night ask first.

• Apple Watch shows each rig as Mission Tiles; Galaxy Watch draws the night’s subs as a ring, with a Tile one swipe from the watch face
• Pause or resume with a tap; Stop and Stop & Home are confirm-gated
• Complications on the watch face: progress and guiding, and on Apple Watch the finish time
• Autofocus draws its V-curve live, point by point
• The Imaging screen is the actual picture, full-bleed — live stack by default; turn the crown or bezel to zoom 1–4×
• Night Vision dims the picture until you tap to peek

On your TV too. ARIS for Apple TV and Google TV puts the live stack on the big screen, with guiding, the sky and the night’s progress beside it.

Live Stack + Deep Stack

Wake up to finished images.

Watch the target build sub by sub, stacked live on the rig while you shoot — in colour, as each filter’s stack joins an LRGB, SHO or HOO composite. When the sequence ends, the rig re-stacks the whole night into an archival master FITS + JPEG and pushes “deep stack ready” to your phone by morning.

• Live stacking on the rig — star-aligned, sigma-clipped, growing every sub
• Live colour composites per target — LRGB, RGB, SHO or HOO from the filters you’re shooting; Auto steps up to a fuller palette as channels join
• One-shot colour cameras too: a dual-band filter such as L-eXtreme makes HOO
• Not a separate capture mode — flip stacking on or off any time, even mid-target, and the overnight deep stack covers every sub of the night either way
• Per-frame quality gates — clouds and tracking blips get dropped, not stacked
• Automatic overnight re-stack: master FITS + stretched JPEG in your files at dawn
• Phone push when it’s ready

ARIS Shuttle

The night’s frames, on your desktop by morning.

The ARIS Shuttle for macOS, Windows, and Linux quietly pulls every completed frame off your rigs into a clean target → night → lights / darks / flats / masters layout on the computer where you actually process. Each frame checked on arrival, resumable, and it never needs a hole in your firewall — the Shuttle pulls.

• Signed installers for macOS and Windows
• A folder layout Siril and PixInsight already understand
• Every computer keeps its own sync cursor — the observatory Mac and the office PC both stay current
• Remote pull of stacked masters over your rig’s secure tunnel (early access)

Multi-rig arrays

One session. Every rig.

ARIS is built for arrays — it’s the A in the name. Connect a fleet: the backyard Pi, the club dome, the remote observatory. Orchestrate all of them from a single session, each rig with its own plan, status, and guide graph — and every rig’s field of view on one sky map.

• Every mount, camera, and guider at a glance
• Independent sequences per rig, one pane of glass
• Every rig’s frame on one sky map — drawn where each scope points, at its own size
• The meridian zone lights up as the view or a scope comes near it — your flip window and the mount’s own limit
• Check in from anywhere — secure per-rig access with zero port forwarding or router config (beta)
• Lock-screen alerts when the night finishes — or needs you
• Made for imaging clubs and remote observatories
• From a backyard pair to a facility pier row — per-rig isolation, one operations view

Running a hosting facility? Per-scope Enterprise plans →

Community Missions

A hundred backyards. One deep image.

You’re not imaging alone anymore. A mission is a cohort of ARIS rigs on the same target in the same weeks — and it turns your scarcest resource into leverage: spare a single clear hour and it joins the cohort’s hundred; the master that comes back holds more integration than your backyard could gather in a season. Your rig does the work: after each night on the mission target it vets your subs and sends only the good ones, with every frame credited to you. And when the mission closes, the finished deep image comes back to everyone who fed it.

• Image with people — a shared target, a shared cohort, a shared first light
• Missions match your rig by pixel scale and framing — sharp setups feed detail, wide fields feed color and depth
• Your wish list lights up when a mission is running on a target you’ve been meaning to shoot — join with the hours you actually have
• Vetted subs upload automatically after each night — full or clouded-short, every accepted frame lands in the mission ledger under your name
• Personal metadata stripped before upload — your name, your site, your business
• Free to join, on any tier — first missions underway now (early access)