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About Polaris Astro Controller

Polaris Astro Controller is astrophotography software you run on your own machine and open in a browser. It lives on a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC or whatever computer sits next to the telescope, and you reach it from any device on your network, with nothing to install on the device you are looking at. It drives the gear (INDI, ASCOM, Alpaca and native camera SDKs), does the live stacking, guiding, focusing, plate solving and sequencing, and comes with a full editor, AI background extraction, denoise and deconvolution included.

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Author & contact

Daniel Wagner Oliveira de Medeiros

Created and maintained by Daniel Wagner Oliveira de Medeiros - Chemical engineer & software developer.

Daniel is a chemical engineer (UFRN, Brazil) and an experienced software developer with 21+ years of experience. He designs and ships production software across Windows Desktop, Linux and macOS, on mobile (Android and iOS with Xamarin), and increasingly with on-device AI.

His main project is DWSIM, a free, open-source, CAPE-OPEN-compliant chemical process simulator he has developed since 2008. DWSIM models entire chemical plants: rigorous thermodynamics and phase equilibria, dozens of unit operations, petroleum characterization and dynamic simulation, running on Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android and iOS. It is used worldwide by students, universities and process engineers as an open alternative to commercial simulators, and it won the 2012 CAPE-OPEN Award.

Polaris Astro Controller brings that same engineering discipline to astrophotography: real numerical and scientific code, from astrometry, guiding and plate solving to image stacking, colour calibration and on-device AI, built to run reliably on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi. It is where two decades of software engineering meet a lifelong pull toward the night sky.

GitHub LinkedIn DWSIM AstroBin

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Version & source

New versions come out often. The current code, the latest build and the release notes all live on the project page on GitHub, and if you installed from a .deb, Polaris updates itself with one click from the status bar.

Project page Releases Download & Install

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Report a problem

Found a bug, or thought of something Polaris should do? Open an issue or start a discussion on GitHub. The reporter built into the app fills in your client and server details for you, which usually saves a round of questions.

Open an issue Start a discussion

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Support the project

Polaris stays free and open source, full stop. If it has saved you an evening of fiddling and you feel like chipping in, that is welcome, and it is entirely optional. You are just as welcome to follow the development news and hang around the community.

❤ Donate Patreon Discord Star on GitHub
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Credits & acknowledgements

Polaris stands on the shoulders of a lot of astronomy and open-source projects. Some we take code from, some we studied as a reference, and many of them run inside the capture and processing stack every night. Thank you to everyone listed below. The full licence texts ship with the app and live in the source repository.

Built on N.I.N.A.
  • N.I.N.A. - Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy Stefan Berg and the N.I.N.A. contributors. Polaris is derived from N.I.N.A.; large parts of the imaging, astrometry, sequencer and equipment model originate here (MPL-2.0).
Guiding & gear simulation
  • PHD2 - Open PHD Guiding Andy Galasso, Bret McKee, Craig Stark and the PHD2 contributors. Used both as the managed external guider and as the reference for the built-in native autoguider and the gear simulator (BSD-3-Clause).
Image processing & AI
  • GraXpert the GraXpert development team. Background extraction, denoising and deconvolution ONNX models, and the auto-stretch algorithm Polaris uses by default.
  • nox charvey2718. StarNet-like star-removal model (native colour and gray), the default behind Remove stars in FILES. Code and weights MIT.
  • starrem2k13 code2k13. pix2pix-style U-Net star-removal model, an alternative in Remove stars. Code and weights MIT.
  • StarNet++ Nikita Misiura (nekitmm). The original star-removal neural network, available in Remove stars. Code MIT; pre-trained weights are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (NonCommercial).
  • Siril the Free-Astro / Siril team. Optional external pre-processing and stacking integration.
Plate solving
  • ASTAP Han Kleijn. The default fast offline plate solver and star database.
  • Astrometry.net Dustin Lang, David W. Hogg and collaborators. Local and online blind plate solving.
  • PlateSolve3 PlaneWave Instruments. Alternative plate solver.
Equipment, protocols & camera SDKs
  • INDI Library Jasem Mutlaq and the INDI community. The primary equipment-control protocol (400+ Linux drivers).
  • ASCOM Initiative & Alpaca the ASCOM Initiative. Windows COM drivers and the cross-platform Alpaca protocol.
  • ZWO ASI SDK Suzhou ZWO Co., Ltd. Native ZWO camera support.
  • SVBony SDK SVBONY. Native SVBony camera support.
  • Player One SDK Player One Astronomy. Native Player One camera support.
  • ToupTek SDK ToupTek Astro. Native ToupTek (and OEM-alike) camera support.
  • Nikon SDK Nikon Corporation. Nikon DSLR / mirrorless support.
  • Canon EDSDK Canon Inc. Canon EOS DSLR / mirrorless support on Windows.
  • Sony Camera Remote SDK Sony Corporation. Sony Alpha camera support on Windows.
  • libgphoto2 / gPhoto2 the gPhoto team. DSLR / mirrorless support on Linux, via the INDI gphoto driver.
Sky data, catalogs & astrometry
In-browser UI libraries
  • Alpine.js Caleb Porzio and contributors. The reactive framework behind the web UI.
  • Chart.js the Chart.js contributors. Focus / guiding / statistics charts.
  • OpenSeadragon the OpenSeadragon contributors. Deep-zoom image viewer.
  • noVNC the noVNC authors. The embedded PHD2 GUI on Windows (MPL-2.0).
  • xterm.js the xterm.js authors. In-browser terminal.
  • SunCalc Vladimir Agafonkin. Sun / twilight calculations for the sky view.
  • SortableJS the SortableJS contributors. Drag-and-drop in the sequencer.
Server & .NET libraries
  • Silk.NET the .NET Foundation. OpenCL bindings for the optional SBC GPU compute backend.
  • SkiaSharp Microsoft, wrapping Google's Skia. Server-side image encoding and rendering.
  • LibRaw the LibRaw authors (LGPL-2.1 / CDDL). Optional system shared library, loaded at runtime to decode DSLR/mirrorless RAW (CR2/NEF/ARW) into real 16-bit linear data for the live stack.
  • ONNX Runtime (Web) Microsoft. Runs the GraXpert AI models in the browser.
  • YARP Microsoft. Reverse proxy for the embedded device web UIs.
  • .NET Community Toolkit (MVVM) the .NET Foundation.
  • K4os.Compression.LZ4 Milosz Krajewski. Fast frame compression for the live preview.
  • LettuceEncrypt Nate McMaster. Automatic Let's Encrypt certificates.
  • Serilog the Serilog contributors. Structured logging.
  • Json.NET James Newton-King. JSON serialization.
  • SSH.NET the SSH.NET contributors.
  • SMBLibrary Tal Aloni. Pure-managed SMB1/SMB2 client for the auto-push-to-network-storage backend.
  • net-mdns (Makaretu.Dns) Richard Schneider. The nina.local mDNS discovery.
  • SQLite D. Richard Hipp and the SQLite team. On-device databases.
  • Rockchip RKNN runtime Rockchip. Optional NPU acceleration for AI models on RK35xx boards.

Plus the wider amateur astronomy and free-software communities whose tools, drivers, documentation and feedback make a project like this possible. If your work is used here and not listed, it is an oversight, not an intent; please let us know on GitHub.

Polaris Astro Controller is a community-driven fork of N.I.N.A. It is not affiliated with or supported by the official N.I.N.A. team. For anything Polaris, open an issue on this repository; please do not contact the N.I.N.A. developers about it.