Your whole night in one place: the gear, the guiding, the plate solving and the sequencer. It runs on a Raspberry Pi, an Orange Pi, a Windows mini PC or whatever else you have around, and you drive it from the browser on your phone, your laptop or the tablet in the warm room.
Polaris Astro Controller is a community fork of N.I.N.A. It is not affiliated with, or supported by, the official N.I.N.A. team, so if something here misbehaves, open an issue on this repository instead of writing to the N.I.N.A. developers.
From plugging the gear in to a finished picture: capture, guiding, framing, live stacking, sequencing and AI post-processing, all of it from the browser.
Talk to your gear over INDI (400+ Linux drivers), over ASCOM and Alpaca across the network, or straight through the native SDKs for ZWO, Player One, SVBONY and Altair, plus Canon, Nikon and Sony bodies. Auto-discovery finds what is plugged in, so you rarely go hunting for a driver.
Run a second imaging camera on the same mount with its own optics, exposure, and gain, captured in parallel. Add a motorised guide-scope focuser and run auto-focus on any optical train: main, auxiliary, or guide. DSLR and mirrorless bodies get a real ISO dropdown.
A native PHD2 implementation drives guiding directly, with a live RA/Dec chart, dither, settle, and profiles. When you want the original PHD2 interface, fall back to the real application embedded right in the browser over xpra or VNC.
A full sky explorer powered by the Stellarium Web Engine, with total mount integration. Pick any target, slew to it, then plate-solve and center automatically, all from the browser.
Line up several targets and let the planner sort out the order by visibility. Each one gets its elevation curve and a capture window you drag to set the start and the end, with its own re-center, re-focus and dither cadence. Polaris runs them through the night and tells you up front how long the whole thing takes.
EAA-style live stacking with registration, integration, and real-time stretch over a bandwidth-adaptive WebSocket stream, so the image builds up live as each frame lands.
Record high-frame-rate video for planetary, lunar, and solar work, then process it on the spot for lucky-imaging results.
A tree-based sequencer with containers, loop conditions, and event triggers: auto-focus on temperature or HFR drift, meridian flip, dither, safety abort. Drag and drop the whole plan in the browser.
Automated focusing with V-curve and HFR fitting, kicked off by temperature change or HFR drift during a sequence, so stars stay tight all night.
A full STUDIO for stacking and post-processing, AI background extraction, denoise and deconvolution included, running on your own computer's GPU through the browser or on the board's NPU.
Split a master into starless and stars-only layers with an in-browser AI model (nox, starrem2k13, or StarNet++), stretch each one on its own, then recombine them with Image Blend (Screen, Add, or Lighten). The process-the-stars-separately workflow, no PixInsight needed.
Some one-shot-colour cameras leave a one-sided blue or magenta fringe on bright stars, with a dark notch on the other side. Polaris lines the channels up to sub-pixel precision and rebuilds the colour and brightness symmetry around each star, carefully in crowded fields, and shows you a before and after of the brightest ones.
OpenCL-backed GPU acceleration for the heavy image-processing paths like debayer, stretch, and stacking, with a transparent CPU fallback when no GPU is present. On top of that, AI background extraction, deconvolution, and denoise run via GraXpert, using the client GPU in the browser or the server's NPU, with an Auto/NPU/GPU/CPU picker: Rockchip on the Orange Pi 5 Pro, Qualcomm Hexagon on the Radxa Q6A, or a Vulkan GPU lane.
Polaris has a benchmark built in: run it and you get a single number, so you can compare boards before you buy one. Higher is better. Everything below is a Release build.
| Device | Cores | Polaris score | Stacking | Capture | Memory BW | Approx. USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orange Pi Zero 3 (Allwinner H618) | 4 cores | 6.9 Mpx/s | 7.4 Mpx/s | 10.4 GB/s | $20-35 | |
| Raspberry Pi 4 Model B | 4 cores | 22.2 Mpx/s | 11.5 Mpx/s | 4.7 GB/s | $55-75 | |
| Orange Pi 4 Pro (Allwinner A733) best value | 8 cores | 31 Mpx/s | 30.9 Mpx/s | 8.6 GB/s | $50-70 | |
| Raspberry Pi 5 Model B | 4 cores | 42.1 Mpx/s | 39.9 Mpx/s | 8.2 GB/s | $70-100 | |
| Orange Pi 5 Pro (RK3588S) | 8 cores | 44.6 Mpx/s | 46.5 Mpx/s | 48 GB/s | $130-160 | |
| Radxa Dragon Q6A (QCS6490) | 8 cores | 55.8 Mpx/s | n/a | 18.8 GB/s | $120-140 | |
| Core i9-13900KF + RTX 5070 | 32 threads | 99.4 Mpx/s | 89 Mpx/s | 41 GB/s | $1,500-2,200 |
Polaris score is the headline figure; Mpx/s columns are live-stack and capture throughput. The Orange Pi 5 Pro is shown with the OpenCL GPU backend on (274; 227 CPU only) and the Pi 5 at its best, actively cooled run. The Orange Pi 4 Pro is the best value here and the board Polaris recommends: eight cores and LPDDR5 for about the price of a Raspberry Pi 4. The Radxa Dragon Q6A is the fastest SBC here and runs CPU-only (its Adreno GPU is a net loss). The Q6A figures are its best run (317, after a better power supply and a fan went on the board); its capture throughput was not re-measured on that run. Prices are rough street estimates for the board alone (no SD card, power, or case); the Core i9 row is a full desktop build for reference, not an SBC. The Orange Pi Zero 3 is the entry point: it shows Polaris runs on a 1.5 GB board (its Mali-G31 GPU is a net loss too, so it runs CPU-only). Full per-device tables and methodology in the benchmark docs.
Side by side with the popular boxes and desktop suites. A star marks something nothing else on this list does. The cells follow what each product advertises, and we are happy to be corrected.
| Feature | Polaris | ASIAIR | StellaVita 2.0 | StellarMate | KStars/Ekos | N.I.N.A. | PINS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware options | RPi · Orange Pi · x86 · Windows | own box | own box | RPi (OS or box) | Linux · Win · Mac · RPi | Windows | Raspberry Pi |
| Full web UI (any browser / device) ★ | app | app | EkosLive / VNC | EkosLive | desktop | VNC | |
| Control multiple hosts from one client ★ | |||||||
| Open source | AGPL | core only | GPL | MPL | |||
| Free (no paid app, OS, or box) | box | box | paid OS / box | ||||
| Multi-brand cameras | ZWO | ||||||
| INDI + ASCOM + Alpaca | INDI | INDI | INDI | ASCOM / Alpaca | INDI | ||
| Auxiliary (2nd) camera ★ | |||||||
| Focuser for aux & guide camera ★ | |||||||
| Live stacking (EAA) | plugin | ||||||
| Advanced sequencer + multi-target planner | scheduler | scheduler | |||||
| Built-in image editor / post-processing | |||||||
| AI tools (BG extract, denoise, deconv, star removal) ★ | |||||||
| Processing + AI run on the client / browser ★ | |||||||
| GPU / NPU acceleration (OpenCL · RKNN · QNN) ★ | |||||||
| Auto post-processing workflow ★ | |||||||
| AI assistant (chat) ★ | |||||||
| Photometric colour calibration (SPCC / PCC) | plugin | plugin | |||||
| Built-in remote internet access | EkosLive |
✓ yes · ~ partial or limited · ✗ no
Polaris is free and open source. The only money you spend is on an inexpensive single-board computer (4 GB is comfortable, and it runs on as little as 1.5 GB), plus a power box like the SVBony SV241 or the Gemini Power Box if you want one, both often on sale. No proprietary controller to buy, no paid app, no OS licence, no subscription.
A few more corners of the interface, all of it running in a browser. Click any shot to see it bigger.
GNU AGPL v3, built on the N.I.N.A. project. Bring your own scope.
Free & open-source · GNU AGPL v3 · built on the N.I.N.A. project.